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This is one of the strongest arguments I've seen for simply starting with the "default" stack. Move to other stuff when you feel the pain. If you're teaching or just starting off with Rails, don't use the "Prime" stack stuff until you really need it.
Using Steve's definitions from the article, the tutorial I usually point people to is Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ which uses the "Prime" stack. I believe I read somewhere that Michael was going to come out with a "37 signals" stack version as well. One message I'd like people to understand when they're starting out with Rails is that it really is confusing, and that being confused an…
I still recommend Michael's tutorial to anyone new to rails, but a '37 signals' stack version would be great.
Thanks for this article, Steve.
1) Beginners need to listen to one person's opinion and trust them
2) Learning about the people and community around your tools is paramount.
#2 will allow them to advance past whichever stack #1 places them.
There are, of course, other caveats. For example, when a beginner finds an answer to their question on stack overflow, but the example code uses HAML instead of ERB, they need to have a foundation deep enough that allows them to at least recognize the code without feeling lost (or use those "lost" moments as opportunities to educated them about that feeling, which is rather normal for a beginner in anything).
Etc.
This is such a clean mental model that I was skeptical. I started scrutinizing it and found myself thinking about how it omits some deployment choices. I realized that this is a good thing, because the development and deployment choices have one big difference: development choices require rewriting when you change them. http://benatkin.com/2013/01/14/steve-klabnik-on-rails-stacks... Thanks for this article, Steve.
This is a great compliment, thank you.
I mostly left deployment out because that's not part of Rails' domain: Rack lets us not care about that when building things.
Using Steve's definitions from the article, the tutorial I usually point people to is Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ which uses the "Prime" stack. I believe I read somewhere that Michael was going to come out with a "37 signals" stack version as well. One message I'd like people to understand when they're starting out with Rails is that it really is confusing, and that being confused an…
I am a relative newcomer to rails (1 year) and web programming in general. I stumbled across Michael Hartl's excellent tutorial and fell in love with ruby and rails right away, and shortly thereafter developed a deep-rooted hatred (well, strong dislike) of rspec. All of the fun I gained by using ruby was sucked out of me by rspec. Months later I decided to try testunit and in retrospect I wish I hadn't waited so long…
While I have more than a few complaints about Rails, rspec certainly has never been one of them.
Just my two cents.
How do these two options stack up to just not using Rails and using something like Sinatra instead for beginners? When I started with Rails, I spent 2 days figuring out the standard web framework functions / workflow, and then I gave up. When I picked up Sinatra, the pieces were small enough that I could learn them individually, master them, and learn how they were put together. Then, when I came back to Rails, I had…
I, too, am a bottom-up learner, but most people (in my professional experience) are not. Look at the success of Rails Girls, for example: beginners get waaay more excited and engaged by Getting Something Up There than they do learning the intricate details of HTTP.