Bogdan Pop : Web development , Photography , Dj

I’ve said it one year ago! I’ve said it hundreds of time since I said it one year ago. Well, that day has come today, and I started learning Ruby, Rails, all together ROR, or RubyOnRails. The name doesn’t really matter. What matters most is my first feeling I got after starting to read some chunks of ruby.

At first (couple of minutes), it seemed a bit harsh, but 15 minutes into reading an awesome book, I discovered that ruby is really easy! Of course, this depends on how skilled you are, perhaps, but for me it seemed very easy to understand. It has a very simple syntax, it is OOP, which is great for me, and I am really speechless when it comes to binding a ROR application to a database. This process is done by creating a database, however you like, changing connection configuration, and then creating models, and then running a simple: rake db:migrate in the command line. Of course, you need to specify some other small stuff, but the process is very very simple. If it happens you know SQL, than rails’s way in handling db creation, updating, altering etc. will seem like the cherry on top of the cake. It is simply beautiful.

What I also loved is that Jobs, Steve Jobs knew I will eventually need ruby, and bundled my MBP with ruby installed. I didn’t even had to install anything. I had ruby, I had mysql, I had apache.

4 hours later, 100 pages into a 600+ page book I feel like I knew ruby for a long time. Fascinating. Oh boy, oh boy. I will post my opinions, and feedback regarding ROR as I will go ahead into learning it, and testing it.

Wrap up:
1st day: 4 amazing hours. I already created an administration interface for products, with images, input validation and other features.

There are many web developers which outsource a part of their development process. Copyrighting. They do this simply because they are not good at it, they don’t like it, or because it is easier, cheaper. Yes, sometimes, it is cheaper to outsource copyrighting instead of writing yourself your own copy. This is due to the fact that the design of a website, for example, is more expensive than placing the content into a website, even if that content is highly optimized.

A good start for text writing, before learning optimization techniques and how to write good copy in one domain, should be a place where you can find out how each text types should be written. Such texts could be narrative,  reports, analytical, description, review and so on. The website linked above is a very god place to start.

Cheers!