Diving into Ruby on Rails
It seems like everyone in the web development community has been talking about Ruby on Rails for the past few months. It's the latest thing; it's the bee's knees. So, a few months ago, I read this article over at O'Reilly's ONLamp.com. It was pretty easy to follow along and I had everything set up in no time. I played around with it for a few hours and then put it aside.
About a month ago, I decided to really take the dive into Ruby, so I started reading "Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby". It's a very strange book, but kept me interested as I read it on the train each weekend. Seeing that Ruby was cool, I decided to go ahead and learn about Rails.
I quickly found myself frustrated with the lack of clear tutorials and examples of Rails. I decided to buy the PDF version of "Agile Web Development with Rails" and I've been working my way through that. If you're looking to learn Ruby on Rails, this is the book you need. In fact, it seems to be the first and only book about Ruby on Rails.
Observations so far:
- Rails does help you write "real-world applications with joy and less code …" but with Rails comes some serious learning over-head. Most obviously, you need to learn Ruby! So learning Ruby on Rails in your spare time (like me) can take a long time - I think it'll be worth it, though.
- Setting up Rails on Windows is a snap. Setting it up on Mac OS X Tiger is a pain.
- I opted for doing my Rails work on the Mac because it has what appears to be the best editor for quickly editing your files - TextMate.
I'll write more as I go along, join me if you like. It'll be fun, I'm sure.