Even if it did matter while picking one (and I don't see how), a more useful comparison would be a time-since-framework-release weighted number of books (sort of like HN ranks)
Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
#12That's funny, in the beginning the Rails people used to brag how you only needed one book and would show this picture: http://i44.tinypic.com/98uhs6.png Now it looks like they turned into Java?
Not quite the same, in this article pretty much all of the books are teaching Rails. The link you provided shows a different Java technology for each book. You only need one of the books to learn Rails.
Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
#13I don't understand, why does it matter?
Affiliate links to amazon?
This has got to be the lamest excuse for posting a bunch of amazon links I've seen in a while. Usually there's at least some pretense of "reviewing" the titles.
Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
#14I don't understand, why does it matter?
Well, the article says: I’ll write about why this matters tomorrow. Tune in tomorrow! All I can figure is that either (a) Java and/or PHP are about to declare "victory" again, whatever that means, or (b) it will be concluded that the framework with the smallest number of books is superior because the docs are DRYer than everybody else's docs. Which might well be another moral victory for some obscure Lisp dialect. I'…
Goddamnit, Now I'm writing rules in my head!
Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
#15I’ll write about why this matters tomorrow.
As the author hopes we forget about his post before he has to write about why it matters. They're both good frameworks. Rails has more books for a number of reasons:
* It's been around longer. It also achieved API stability sooner. Not that Django had an unstable API, but there were big changes for longer (such as newforms). So, Rails has lent itself to having books written about it for a lot longer and has gone through many revisions since the books started coming out.
* Django has better documentation. Sure, Rails has its guides section and api-doc, but Django's documentation tends to be better than multiple books. So, there's been less of a push for books. Also, with Adrian and Jacob (the co BDFL of Django) having put a free book out there at djangobook.com, it means dead-tree books are likely to make less money.
* The Django community is smaller. Smaller means less people buying books, means less books written.
This post is the ultimate in link-bait. What's next: Why Java is better than Lisp: curly braces! I'll write more on that later ;-)
Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
#16I don't get it. Is the point that Rails is better because it has more books, or that Django is better because it doesn't have so many shitty books? (yes, I am judging them by their covers)
Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
#17I don't understand, why does it matter?
Well, the article says: I’ll write about why this matters tomorrow. Tune in tomorrow! All I can figure is that either (a) Java and/or PHP are about to declare "victory" again, whatever that means, or (b) it will be concluded that the framework with the smallest number of books is superior because the docs are DRYer than everybody else's docs. Which might well be another moral victory for some obscure Lisp dialect. I'…
That sneaky sonofabitch!
RoR obviously gained some massive popularity. However I don't understand why Django did not gain as much as RoR did. Python is a damn good language, which by the way is gaining some momentum due to google's big fat presence with the app engine.
So why is Ruby so popular? To be honest I am actually pretty unhappy with ruby (don't give me any more one-liner ruby scripts or I will bitch-smack yo ass) with how easy it is to make that language unreadable compared to say... python.
I work with a web server built in javascript and can tell you that with a loosely structured dynamic language it is horribly easy even for decent programmers to make unreadable code.
Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
#18That's funny, in the beginning the Rails people used to brag how you only needed one book and would show this picture: http://i44.tinypic.com/98uhs6.png Now it looks like they turned into Java?
Not quite the same, in this article pretty much all of the books are teaching Rails. The link you provided shows a different Java technology for each book. You only need one of the books to learn Rails.
I enjoyed the picture but:
Struts cookbook? Well thats not a requirement. There is the RoR cookbook. Add that to the pile.
IF you are making an xml-based external web service I don't care what language you still write the XSLT to give out as a public api. So thats another one to the ruby pile.
Struts in action? There are 2 learn struts books in that pile.
In any case if you think more than a few seconds about that image you will cut down the java side and incraese the ruby side to equalibrium.
Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
#19I have always had a problem with django documentation. It's bad. I struggled for a long time with django figuring out what I could do on my own, but the problem isn't simply on the community size, or the number of books, it's also the type of people involved. There's a number of people whom don't want to see it change/grow and that's where I found it frustrating. I don't think you can expect more books to be written about it as a result because many want to keep it niche. It's a great framework otherwise and the changes made in the 1.0 release were awesome. Django is great b/c it allows for full leverage of python. The patch to python only made it that much better too. Django doesn't bake everything in so it's super simplistic in nature. However, I'm now a rails coder and I find scaffolding dumb so I'll switch to merb soon.Working outside in is for the birds, but where the jobs are and better books.
Last point, documentation in my mind winds the race... but community is just as important. The kinda of people you attract etc.. Maybe django will get better in the future and not everything in everybook and documentation will explicitly assume you to be an expert.
Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
#20In the spirit of the article, I prove that Jesus is better than Rails, because there are 779 times more books about him. Jesus books (333,560): http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1232312844/ref=sr_nr_i_0?ie=UTF8... Rails books (428): http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstrip...
Praise the lord! Technically jesus is better than everything then.
http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1232320070/ref=sr_nr_i_2?ie=UTF8...
Damn Jesus beats porn but only by 8 times! (40,491) We have ways to go people! Lets make more porn books!