I’ve just got my hands on the Pragmatic Programmers Programming Ruby and Agile Web development with Rails and have been wading my way slowly through it all.
The slowness is not I must hasten to add a result of some facet of Rails or a pair of unreadable books (and boy do I have a few of those on my programmers book shelves), it is simply the result of too much work.
So all in all I have only been able to devote a few hours hear and there to get my head around Rails and Ruby, although I have read both books cover to cover whilst eating breakfast (sad I know).
A few thoughts
Seriously who can resist the lure of a zen like programming language that has come from the mists of Japan, hey maybe programming can be cool to people who aren’t programmers, becuase lets face it no matter how gorgeous your code or elegant the user workflow of your app, nobody else gives a toss (especially the designer sitting next to you). When I think of Japan, it is Hiroshige (the artist) or crazy dressed tourist / students in London, and that is much better than a big guy with 4 litres of coke, a beard and a Metalica T-shirt writing binary.
The idea of a framework that does all the grunt work for you is nice too, especially one that lets you rip away that armature as you go.
I also like the idea of something that is modern and fresh, and Model View Controller makes what you do a serious (beard tugging web app) but without all the Java thing. After all I can’t be the only one who has noticed that all these ball breaking Java based web monster thingys are sodding slow, and anyway who wants to write a trillion lines of XML config stuff?
So along comes Ruby on Rails…
to be continued…