Apr 19
Ruby, Rails, Day one
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.
April 20th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Oky doky. Day two ended.
I feel Ruby is even better than yesterday. If I compare to the early days I was learning PHP, I started using sessions in PHP a couple of months after I wrote my first PHP script. Of course, this is not the case of Ruby. It couldn’t be. Today I just wrote some session handling scripts, I found out about how to handle errors, how to log them and display the normal error message one arbitrary visitor should see, and many other interesting things.
PS: I only coded for about 3 hours today. The more you go into Ruby, the simpler it gets, the faster you produce working stuff.
Marvelous!
April 21st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I just stumbled this post, and I’m curious what book are you using? I’m trying to learn RoR at the moment myself, yet I don’t have a text resource to learn from.
April 21st, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Hello Justin,
I think there’s only one good book to read when you start out Ruby on Rails. That is the one published by The Pragmatic Programmers, titled: “Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition” (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails2). The PDF version costs little under 25$ and I warmly recommend it.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:09 am
Hi, nice… very nice page!
Good luck!
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Thanks man…