31–40 of 65 posts
On the article, I strongly disagree that vim requires plugins to be viable for Ruby development. The Janus plugin should especially be carefully considered as it wraps up a lot of magic that could prevent the new vim user from effectively learning vim itself.
I have spent the past three weeks getting my head into Ruby (on the hopeful way to understanding Rails). With so many different languages and stacks, it makes the early stages extremely daunting for a beginner.
I have found comfort in the following resources:
1) The only website I found that actually visualized how everything sits together: http://techiferous.com/2010/07/roadmap-for-learning-rails/
2) I persevered with a Ruby programming book: Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (by Peter Cooper)
3) Spent a few days on a zero install Ruby tutorial: http://tryruby.org
I plan to write some blog posts on the journey however may wait until I get passed the basics before sharing too much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had this discussion already (see the link). Maybe it's a matter of taste but I think this book has some severe weaknesses and thus, I wouldn't recommend it.
No offence but perhaps you bought the wrong book? Eloquent Ruby is about style and design patterns, it's almost about the philosophy of Ruby code, best practises, aesthetics and the author's experiences. Books like that are fundamentally about taste and style and technique; they can't really be "wrong". You might disagree with the author and think you have a superior approach but to say that randomly googling the top…
Don't get me wrong, your reply is kind of abstract and philosophical. I explained why this book just failed and should not be recommended (mainly the style and really, really awkward, wacky examples) and I face abstract replies. Sometimes I think these comments and Amazon reviews are all faked by SEO/Webspam people driving the book's sale (no offence, but because of guys like you recommending a totally weak book over and over without the slightest criticism I bought this crappy book and it's a really bad and frustrating experience). And again: I am not dumb or do not know what I wanted or bought (btw this is bad discussion style to implicitly question the buyer intent or skills, it was very indirect but still there).
OT and hijacking this thread: 1. Who is actually new to Ruby? (After Ruby or rather the popular RoR is there almost for a decade everyone should have made some experiences with Ruby, so I am wondering if there are many new Rubiest) 2. What new language/stack did you start to learn recently? (for me: Node.js)
In my experience it is still vastly harder to hire someone with any degree of Ruby exposure vs. PHP developers, for example.
Ruby is still a niche language.
I would like to get some advice from experienced Ruby hackers. Currently I am picking up Ruby through rails, which I am assuming is fairly common. I want to know the downsides to this and what people did to supplement their ruby knowledge beyond Rails. I eventually would like to write my own gems, contribute to open source, and so forth. I am absolutely not satisfied with just consuming Rails.
I'd highly recommend The Well Grounded Rubyist by David Black http://www.manning.com/black2/ if you want a good intro to Ruby, I found it a much better intro than the Pickaxe
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably the biggest downside is that you'll incorrectly assume that some parts of Rails are actually part of Ruby. Then you'll miss them when they're not there and possibly feel a small amount of sadness. Oh the humanity! :) The big one is ActiveSupport. There are many extensions to common Ruby objects like String, Enumerable, Hash, etc. For example. In Rails, you'll use something like this quite frequently: some_st…
Any gem can use ActiveSupport as a dependency, just like Rails does
From the description it seems like he doesn't quite get the distinction himself, and one of the later examples is broken:
"Array.new.methods - Object.methods" should read "Array.new.methods - Object.new.methods". Otherwise he's in fact subtracting the methods available on an error instance from the methods available on an instance of Class, not the methods available on a generic object..
I'm in the middle of picking up Ruby primarily because there was a GitHub project I wanted to fork and modify for my purposes that happened to be written in Ruby.The biggest problem I found is that the Ruby (or maybe the Rails?) community by and large provides shit instructions on how to get something running. I checked out a handful of projects and they all said things like, "Just deploy the normal what you deploy a…
I've actually found the documentation for projects in the Ruby community, on the whole, to be quite excellent. That being said, I can sympathize with the confusion getting things deployed, if only because there are so many options. The best bet for a beginning, IMHO, is to give Heroku a try when getting your first app deployed - they have some really excellent documentation. As a beginner, trying to deploying a rails…
One problem is that their deb package doesn't specify ruby as a dependency. Another problem is that you have to examine their inlined bash install script to get to the .deb package to diagnose that. Another problem was that ubuntu's standard package repositories didn't include the version of ruby they needed (ruby1.9.1 - though I just checked now, and it seems to be available again). So I installed rvm, suggested by www.ruby-lang.org as an easy route, which needed me to install a whole bunch of other stuff, and finally installed the latest version of ruby - but this was too recent for their package to accept. sigh Eventually I found an old, undocumented gem of theirs that would install their command-line tool (well, half of it anyway). Maybe it's seamless if you already have ruby installed - but it's a terrible way to start ruby, in my experience anyway. Possibly it's more streamlined on Windows/Mac.
Then... all three versions of ruby that I tried (1.8, 1.9.1, 1.9.3) had changes that broke my tiny toy code. So astonishing, I'm not even mad.
Look at Python, with 5-year support for Python 2 before breaking compatibility with Python 3. And Java, well, I've never heard of code being broken (assert could have, but never heard it happen).
Ruby is labour-intensive - that's the price of constant (incompatible) improvement. Part of that price is documentation that goes out of date, instructions that go out of date, code that goes out of date. It becomes unrealistic to invest in Ruby - unless you plan to be working intensively on it anyway. Which I think does make sense for its original professional users, who are constantly iterating anyway. But it's not good for people who missed the early wave, when ruby was friendly.
It's a shame, because there's a lot of cool ideas in ruby and cool projects using it. I guess that's the trade-off. But, well, it took so much effort to get heroku installed that I haven't used ruby since.