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Ruby on Rails in a week

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Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#111

Post by AlchemistCamp »

aplummer wrote: post #108
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read all of those and would like to add two more: 1) Learn to Program , by Chris Pine. It's the best book I've read on learning to program in any language. 2) Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer, by Topher Cyll. In a sense it wasn't "practical" at all. But it was a joyous eye-opener to all kinds of applications that turned me into a whirlwind of enthusiasm for months!

> Learn to Program, by Chris Pine My first programming book, 10 years ago in a few months I think. Great read.

My favorite thing about it was how it made even trivially simple exercises fun by making the content humorous. At the beginning you really need that extra reward!

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#112

Post by jmcgough »

raesene9 wrote: post #6
pqdbr wrote: post #2

Having picked up Rails 9 years ago and having been using it literally daily ever since, it's joyful to read from someone that is just starting. I also started with https://www.railstutorial.org/book , highly recommend it. I also loved Metaprogramming Ruby (Paolo Perrotta) - it's more advanced and starts to open your mind to how Rails magic DSL's were built. I just bought today "Rebuilding Rails" ( https://rebuilding-…

Those are great resources. One I'd add to it, for general ruby programming, is the Well Grounded Rubyist ( https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-rubyist-thir... ) . It's been kept up to date (3rd edition was released in 2019) and I found it very readable and informative.

That was one of the books I picked up early in my career and still keep a well-loved, dog-eared copy. It's information-dense without being overwhelming, and teaches a lot of important Ruby concepts. I'm glad to see it's being kept up to date.

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#115

Post by cambalache »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #102
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat ironic but not sure if you know, Typescript is made by Microsoft and the lead Typescript language architect is Anders Hejlsberg who also was heavily involved in the creation and architecture of C#.

There's no irony in finding limitations when building on a poorly planned foundation that don't exist when starting from a clean slate.

Exactly, the idea is great and you can clearly notice the intention of making JS more C#-like, but the foundation is not suitable. Could you imagine trying to "C++size" the whole Python ecosystem? Shudders!

BTW dude I like your content, after Rails, Phoenix is my preferred stack, so nice, and the community is cool, too bad the job opportunities are not there yet in sufficient quantities.

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#116

Post by mathnmusic »

viraptor wrote: post #58
loktarogar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rails _did_ support multiple databases up until then, it just wasn't _as easy_ as everything else in rails. You just defined another database in database.yml (say "second_database") and then ran something like class Foo Still pretty straight forward and simple - just opaque. A lot was available in the Rails ecosystem or using Rails code without being explicitly supported by Rails itself. Much of the last few years ha…

That's just per-model database annotation. It's not enough for use cases like: data sharding, switching reader/writer endpoints at runtime, and a few others. I wouldn't count the basic case as "multi-db support"

I built a Rails app with exactly that set up: sharding, dynamic switching of read/write queries across multiple slaves 10 years ago. It wasn't hard at all. Ruby's full dynamic nature makes many things easy.

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#117

Post by burlesona »

codetheory wrote: post #114

Lack of a lot negative comments on this post is surprising

The "current hotness" always gets praise, while the penultimate hotness gets piles of scorn.

I think the JS ecosystem is fading in hotness - not sure exactly where everyone is going, but Go, Rust, and Python all seem pretty hot these days, so we'll see.

Regardless, that means Ruby/Rails is no longer the penultimate hotness, it's merely a boring old technology that does what it does.

And it turns out, Ruby is a lovely language (with its flaws), and Rails is a useful and impressively productive framework (which has cast a long shadow on the entire web development world).

So I think the narrative is warming back up.

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#118

Post by burlesona »

dstorm1 wrote: post #96

Is it just me or is Rails really complex? Its abstractions are so far removed from anything familiar (HTTP, SQL) that its difficult to understand what is happening unless you deeply understand the framework.

Rails is somewhat complex, but it's a weird kind of complexity. In some ways it is like React: it's almost easier if you learn it first, before you know what it's doing under the hood, so you're not asking yourself "how" all the time.

The good thing about Rails is it's very well-documented, and if you just work your way through the entire Rails guide or the Rails Tutorial, by the end it all clicks together and makes a lot of sense, and from there on it becomes really easy.

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#119

Post by burlesona »

lubesGordi wrote: post #82

I'm a back end C++/rust type and I script with Python. If I wanted to build a front end, is there any reason I'd use Ruby/Rails over Django? I'm not familiar with Rails but I'm curious if it's worthwhile to pick up.

I wouldn't recommend Rails as front-end only. It's fine as a full-stack framework, and rather nice for quickly building out a back-end API, but not really compelling if you're only using the front-end side of things IMO.

That said, I would argue that Ruby is a very similar but nicer scripting language than Python (particularly for general utility / glue scripts), so if you enjoy scripting in Python you would probably find Ruby easy to pick up and potentially a nice compliment to what you already know.

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#120

Post by burlesona »

leetrout wrote: post #53

I took a rails job by accident- I knew rails was in use but I was interviewed in Go and talked about new things going on in Go micro services. I didn’t expect 40 hours a week of rails / ember JS work and that’s my fault. I have 12 years with Django and I was shocked there wasn’t the equivalent of the Django tutorial. Everyone says the rails tutorial is good and I’m sure it’s worth the money but no one at work endorse…

FWIW I require all new hires to work through the Rails Tutorial in their first week. Nobody needs the entire tutorial, but everyone needs parts of it, and it's impossible to know what parts in advance. It's a fairly fun and easy way to get an exhaustive tour of the framework, and afterwards people are pretty much fully productive.

I wish there was an equally good Ruby language tutorial, as my experience is that it's a bit harder to master Ruby than it is to master Rails, but mastering the language is far more valuable.

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