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Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

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Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#21
RoR has a for dummies book. Keep away from RoR. The article writer never claimed which one was better. I think Django is better just because it has no for dummies book.

On a side question for hacker news fellas: Who reads for dummies books? I mean who reads programming language books for dummies? Is there any practical use for them or is it just for people who don't know what they are doing but want to claim to know a language?

Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#22
I bought agile web development with Rails 2 years back(appx) after hearing all hoopla about Rails. The quality of the book was comparable the Pylons online documentation (which has taken some interesting bits from Rails).

The django documentation has been consistently superior from day one. Its the only documentation I refer to when developing with Django. I may dive into the source code to better understand things infrequently.

The other documentation artifacts, like slides, produced by Django core developers are excellent enough to be reused in teaching django.

So, if the blog's author is trying to use no of books as a metric to prove anything, it may be something to do with the gullibility of the target audience and/or lack of solid documentation on the framework website.

Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#23
post #7

That'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?

That's a great point, I totally remember this. Everyone was like, 'We have scaffolding!'.

Now that I've switched from Django to Rails though, I have to say it is plesently surprising how nice of a framework it is... but from a Django to Rails perspective Rails is annoying to the point Merb has gained a lot of success. Anyways, I digress. Thanks for posting that image, had a good laugh about it.

Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#24

I 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…

My first Django project was a "yet another blog in Django" type of site. This is how it worked:

1-day to do the html(very little html knowledge) 1-day to learn css and do it( i had no css or web design experience) 2-days slacking off 1.5 days reading documentation and writing code as i go along 0.5 days finishing the code and inserting the django template tags in to the html, also seting up the admin site and then killing off the project as a good experience.

As you might guess, i had no other web experience, except some simple html, i found the django docs to be extremely to the point and useful. I also had a problem with setting up django, and people on irc helped with that too.

Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

However I don't understand why Django did not gain as much as RoR did

Two reasons.

First, unlike Python, Ruby didn't have any viable web framework in 2004, so it was easy to attract Ruby developers.

Second, and more importantly, David is much better marketer than Adrian. He poked the J2EE hornet's nest and evangelized the hell out of Rails for the first year and really got the snowball rolling.

Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#26
post #13
post #2

I 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.

Wow, I hadn't even noticed that the images were linked, let alone they were affiliate links. This is a pretty low-quality attempt, both for a blog post and a pitch to get money.

Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#27

I 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…

My first Django project was a "yet another blog in Django" type of site. This is how it worked: 1-day to do the html(very little html knowledge) 1-day to learn css and do it( i had no css or web design experience) 2-days slacking off 1.5 days reading documentation and writing code as i go along 0.5 days finishing the code and inserting the django template tags in to the html, also seting up the admin site and then ki…

Don't correlate my frustration with not being able to do something or anything in django. That wasn't the case, not what I meant. I'm glad you were able to make a shitty blog, I'm sure you're satisfied with yourself.

Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#28
post #15

I’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…

Funny, I just hopped online to type up tomorrow's post.

I'm not insulting either project; I enjoy using both daily.

Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#29
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, I hadn't even noticed that the images were linked, let alone they were affiliate links. This is a pretty low-quality attempt, both for a blog post and a pitch to get money.

It's not a pitch to get money. I've been pondering this blog post for a while since I noticed the difference in a bookstore, and linking to Amazon was a hundred times easier than finding all the books on the websites of their respective publishers.

Re: Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first Django project was a "yet another blog in Django" type of site. This is how it worked: 1-day to do the html(very little html knowledge) 1-day to learn css and do it( i had no css or web design experience) 2-days slacking off 1.5 days reading documentation and writing code as i go along 0.5 days finishing the code and inserting the django template tags in to the html, also seting up the admin site and then ki…

Don't correlate my frustration with not being able to do something or anything in django. That wasn't the case, not what I meant. I'm glad you were able to make a shitty blog, I'm sure you're satisfied with yourself.

Its not only shitty, its ugly too, thats to be expected from a noob :D

I guess i didn't express my point very well, the idea was that i used the docs and found them very useful, and i was able to do something that i was unable to do if i hadn't. Maybe you could say specifically what you don't like about the docs, here is what i liked:

-there was a good tutorial, that skipped some details, and let me get a general feel of how things work. -the rest of the docs are divided in to sections and finding things was easy, it was pretty well organized. -There were notes and backward compatibility warnings, that helped me avoid some headaches.

Well, i don't like the green colorscheme, but other that that i had no headache with it. Maybe if i went on to make something more complicated?

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