Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ruby on Rails Tutorial

railstutorial.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 82 posts

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#51

Post by sotojuan »

enraged_camel wrote: post #23
sotojuan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professor thought it'd be better to "learn the basics" first, whatever that means. Just another example of academia being out of touch. At least it was an easy A.

PHP has a lot less "magic" in it, so using it will force you to learn a lot of concepts and conventions that Rails takes care of for you (which can have its negatives).

That's a fair point, but I don't think the whole class would've just been Rails. We would've talked about Ruby programming a bit too (the book does as well).

Here's why I think learning Rails would be good for undergrads: You get exposed to patterns like MVC and stuff like server vs client, requests, basic auth/security in a format that is practical and presents itself to fast iteration and quick feedback. I'd much rather learn MVC through Rails than the extremely dull and slow Java GUI apps we did in school.

I think the magicness of Rails is overrated for a beginner. A lot of people like to tinker with low level stuff, but in my experience in college most students wanted to build stuff. Having them build their own routing/template/controllers/etc or whatever would've been less interesting than just learning the high level concepts with Rails first.

As an added benefit, having some experience with Rails would've helped some students get internships.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#52

Post by xentronium »

tjallingt wrote: post #49
crisopolis wrote: post #47

Glad everyone is recommending this but I also hope they recommend learning Ruby first before Rails.

Since you've posted a few comments with this same sentiment a few times in this thread; can you expand on why you feel people would need to learn Ruby before getting started with Rails? Also if you'd have taken a few seconds to open the link to the book and skim through the opening paragraphs you might have read this sentence: > There are no formal prerequisites to this book, and the Ruby on Rails Tutorial contains i…

I kind of agree with GP sentiment for two reasons:

1. Nowadays I mostly advice newcomers to start with sinatra instead of rails, because rails keeps growing in scope and the surface to cover is huge

2. Lots of things rails does might seem magical if you don't know ruby

Don't get me wrong, rails is still bread and butter of myself and other rubyists, but for a newcomer to start with rails is a somewhat strange/scary thing to do.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#53

Post by joshmn »

crisopolis wrote: post #46
ryanSrich wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hopefully they know Ruby first.

This.

I see so many people just skip Ruby fundamentals and go straight into Rails, or worse... they think that Rails is... Ruby.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#55

Post by samb1729 »

xentronium wrote: post #52
tjallingt wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've posted a few comments with this same sentiment a few times in this thread; can you expand on why you feel people would need to learn Ruby before getting started with Rails? Also if you'd have taken a few seconds to open the link to the book and skim through the opening paragraphs you might have read this sentence: > There are no formal prerequisites to this book, and the Ruby on Rails Tutorial contains i…

I kind of agree with GP sentiment for two reasons: 1. Nowadays I mostly advice newcomers to start with sinatra instead of rails, because rails keeps growing in scope and the surface to cover is huge 2. Lots of things rails does might seem magical if you don't know ruby Don't get me wrong, rails is still bread and butter of myself and other rubyists, but for a newcomer to start with rails is a somewhat strange/scary t…

What does GP stand for in this context? I keep seeing it on HN and figured out what it means, but what do the actual letters stand for?

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#56

Post by [deleted] »

samb1729 wrote: post #55
xentronium wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree with GP sentiment for two reasons: 1. Nowadays I mostly advice newcomers to start with sinatra instead of rails, because rails keeps growing in scope and the surface to cover is huge 2. Lots of things rails does might seem magical if you don't know ruby Don't get me wrong, rails is still bread and butter of myself and other rubyists, but for a newcomer to start with rails is a somewhat strange/scary t…

What does GP stand for in this context? I keep seeing it on HN and figured out what it means, but what do the actual letters stand for?

[deleted]

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#57

Post by ryanSrich »

crisopolis wrote: post #46
ryanSrich wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hopefully they know Ruby first.

I don't understand. Why would they need to know Ruby fist? These arent people looking to become devs. They're looking to limp something along until it takes off or dies. There's no need know Ruby for that.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that trying to learn Ruby first is doing yourself a disservice. Just dive right in.

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#58

Post by jholman »

rimantas wrote: post #29
enraged_camel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP has a lot less "magic" in it, so using it will force you to learn a lot of concepts and conventions that Rails takes care of for you (which can have its negatives).

PHP can be compared to Ruby. Rails can be compared to Symfony or Laravel. It makes little sense to compare a language to a framework though.

Nonsense. It makes great sense to compare some languages to some frameworks, for some purposes.

Yes, PHP is a language, and Ruby is a language. PHP does a lot more than that. A default install of PHP + Apache has routing logic, and HTTP parsing (what populates all those superglobals like $_POST?), it has templating (I'm sure ERB came up with all of its syntax independently), etc etc. In the Ruby ecosystem, you those are responsibilities of a "framework". Indeed, no one would argue that Sinatra is not a framework, but I'm not aware of any features of Sinatra that aren't already delivered by PHP out of the box.

If your goal is to build an artificial and incoherent taxonomy of "languages" vs "frameworks", then yes it's very clear that PHP and Rails are different types of things.

If your goal is to actually build web sites, comparing Ruby+Rails (which you might write as "Rails", since it implies the "+Ruby part) to PHP is a very reasonable thing to do. I think it's utterly clear that the GP was comparing "making a web app with PHP" to "making a web app with Ruby and RoR".

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#59

Post by pbreit »

forgingahead wrote: post #6

Highly recommended, this tutorial got many people (myself included) started on Rails. The parent link is to the free-online version, but I do suggest folks who have benefitted from this give back to Michael by spending on the paid version: https://www.railstutorial.org/#pricing No affiliation at all, just want to encourage support to a resource that has been a net-positive to our ecosystem.

I like that it doesn't use the CLI. I've always wondered who uses code generators. My sense is that experienced developers do not. And that novice developers are better off cutting and pasting. I personally loathe code generators which is one of the reasons I've never gotten in to Rails (I know I can do it without but seemingly all the instruction uses it).

Re: Ruby on Rails Tutorial

#60

Post by squeaky-clean »

samb1729 wrote: post #55
xentronium wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree with GP sentiment for two reasons: 1. Nowadays I mostly advice newcomers to start with sinatra instead of rails, because rails keeps growing in scope and the surface to cover is huge 2. Lots of things rails does might seem magical if you don't know ruby Don't get me wrong, rails is still bread and butter of myself and other rubyists, but for a newcomer to start with rails is a somewhat strange/scary t…

What does GP stand for in this context? I keep seeing it on HN and figured out what it means, but what do the actual letters stand for?

Grandparent. As in your comment is my parent comment, and your parent comment would be my grandparent, and so on.
Post reply on HN