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Ruby on Rails Tutorial

railstutorial.org

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#11

Beginner question, having heard rails is not a hot thing anymore and SPAs being the new hot stuff, where do you guys draw the line between a SPA and a server rendered web app? I can see the extreme side cases, the highly interactive web app vs content-heavy-but-not-that interactive web app. But for example, github doesn't have complex interactions and is not content heavy (in the walls of text sense) but its doing ju…

You can have an SPA and still use Rails. Rails would just serve JSON instead of the HTML. Your JavaScript frontend would use that JSON to display stuff and handle actions. Plenty of companies do this.

Cannot speak about amount of junior/entry level jobs out there but in NYC Rails jobs are plentiful.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#12

Beginner question, having heard rails is not a hot thing anymore and SPAs being the new hot stuff, where do you guys draw the line between a SPA and a server rendered web app? I can see the extreme side cases, the highly interactive web app vs content-heavy-but-not-that interactive web app. But for example, github doesn't have complex interactions and is not content heavy (in the walls of text sense) but its doing ju…

This is only my opinion so I would love to hear others input too. I think SPA apps are really good for mobile heavy services. Heavy web services such as github or most CRUD SaaS services are fine as a web app. You can still use front-end frameworks such as React or Angular with a Ruby on Rails back-end. Oftentimes that is overkill though for a basic CRUD SaaS app.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#14

Beginner question, having heard rails is not a hot thing anymore and SPAs being the new hot stuff, where do you guys draw the line between a SPA and a server rendered web app? I can see the extreme side cases, the highly interactive web app vs content-heavy-but-not-that interactive web app. But for example, github doesn't have complex interactions and is not content heavy (in the walls of text sense) but its doing ju…

> Would a site like github benefit much from being a SPA instead of being server side rendered with some JS on the top?

I don't think so. Perhaps there could be some areas they could make the UI richer (say a dynamic code viewer that doesn't require page refreshes, etc)

However, bring it back to the beginning of your comment:

> having heard rails is not a hot thing anymore and SPAs being the new hot stuff

Github doesn't need to be a SPA, nor do most apps. I think many decisions are being made because it's "hot", but generally that's a very poor reason to choose something. (Though to be fair, there's probably many Rails apps that were built in Rails for that very reason)

SPAs carry an entirely new set of concerns. For months, I couldn't order a very important medication online from CVS because their specialty pharmacy site, written in Angular, was busted. I eventually figured out how to make it work by executing Javascript directly in the inspector.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#15
post #4

this is an classic for rails. countless entrepreneur/developers i know have used this as their first 0 to production guide for their first real (shipped, launched, live etc) software projects. I say it's an excellent intro to someone with maybe some academic programming experience to get into web app development. it gives you the kick starter development plan you need to make a Twitter, db, grub hub, air bnb type sta…

It's also amazing for non-programmer tech people like designers and marketers who want to start building their own side projects.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#16
post #7
post #3

I'll always be upset that my college web development class got changed from following this tutorial to early 2000s PHP without a database.

The other day on my way to the airport, I had an Uber driver in Portland who was telling me that he was just about to start a lengthy coding bootcamp in JavaScript and PHP. Not Node, just front-end JS. And Rails was one of the options, but he opted to do PHP with a focus on Drupal. Kind of blew me away. I know Rails seems to have waned relative to when coding bootcamps first became big, but I had thought PHP was well…

This is probably not the popular opinion in this crowd BUT PHP is still the most used back-end language on the web. It has also come a long way since it's early days. Modern PHP is actually decent to work in and learning it will keep you gainfully employed in most areas outside the Bay Area.

For back-end, Python & PHP are still my go to choices. Both are stable, have tons of libraries, have good frameworks and allow you to get stuff done quickly.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#17
post #3

I'll always be upset that my college web development class got changed from following this tutorial to early 2000s PHP without a database.

You know, I'll probably be bammed for saying this, but reading through this very well-made tutorial gave me the opposite reaction.

I am glad I learned and still use PHP and not RoR.

IMHO, there are way too many black-boxes and unnecessary abstractions for such a simple pattern as MVC, which is really nothing more then connecting HTML views to database fields view URI routes.

I recently struggled through my first Ionic mobile app, and all the prebuilt, "auto-magical" tooling stacks and opinionation I see in the tutorial leaves a sour taste in my mouth ie

  gem 'rails',        '5.0.0'
  gem 'puma',         '3.4.0'
  gem 'sass-rails',   '5.0.6'
  gem 'uglifier',     '3.0.0'
  gem 'coffee-rails', '4.2.1'
  gem 'jquery-rails', '4.1.1'
  gem 'turbolinks',   '5.0.0'
  gem 'jbuilder',     '2.4.1'

  group :development, :test do
    gem 'sqlite3', '1.3.11'
    gem 'byebug',  '9.0.0', platform: :mri
  end

  group :development do
    gem 'web-console',           '3.1.1'
    gem 'listen',                '3.0.8'
    gem 'spring',                '1.7.2'
    gem 'spring-watcher-listen', '2.0.0'
  end

  group :production do
    gem 'pg', '0.18.4'
  end
All this for a "toy-app"?

Call me old-school (and I am I suppose, altho I feel I make an hell of an effort keeping up to date), but I cut my programming teeth in C and always respected the very limited but powerful instruction set that language implements, and I, over the years now, respect PHP for creating very powerful constructs (like its magical array handling) but also keeping some C-like simplicity at its core.

Yes of course PHP has its idiosyncratic issues, but I still feel that one of the primary reasons it's so disrespected, I'm very sorry to say, is the snob factor thrown off by serious motherfucking programmers whom seem to feel that the simplicity and power of the language lowers the bar so low that it allows the "unwashed" into the room or something...

To me, thats not a bug its a feature.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#18
One of the best beginner programming books. I was never really confident in programming until I worked through this book. It taught me so much; proper usage of git, persistence using a database, using a programming language that isn't verbose to the point of being confusing, TDD, and most importantly how to think through problems and think about the incremental design of new features. I purchased the hard copy of this book, but I'm amazed that it's always been free online!

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#19
post #7
post #3

I'll always be upset that my college web development class got changed from following this tutorial to early 2000s PHP without a database.

The other day on my way to the airport, I had an Uber driver in Portland who was telling me that he was just about to start a lengthy coding bootcamp in JavaScript and PHP. Not Node, just front-end JS. And Rails was one of the options, but he opted to do PHP with a focus on Drupal. Kind of blew me away. I know Rails seems to have waned relative to when coding bootcamps first became big, but I had thought PHP was well…

There are far more PHP and Java jobs for entry level devs in Portland. Since we don't have very many startups the tech jobs are mostly at financial institutions and non-tech companies.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#20
post #4

this is an classic for rails. countless entrepreneur/developers i know have used this as their first 0 to production guide for their first real (shipped, launched, live etc) software projects. I say it's an excellent intro to someone with maybe some academic programming experience to get into web app development. it gives you the kick starter development plan you need to make a Twitter, db, grub hub, air bnb type sta…

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