Just to say hello

Rails
1

I just subscribed to this list and i just wanted to say hello before
starting dumb questions about rails. I just started my programming
career with a ruby’n’rails application here in italy and i could use
some help, and in time, when i will be more skilled, i will be glad to
give some help back :wink: See you!

Maurizio Marek
[email protected]

2

I would not start my programming carreer with rails myself. If you
look at the list, you will find that most questions are questions
involving incredibly obscure – to me – projects. I think most
of the rail waves are people who have learned how to do web
programming for years on other systems.

Rails is a framework, meaning it is code organised to help you get
going easily. But first you have to learn what you are doing. I
suggest you learn programming with html, php, xml… where you
just write one page and see what it does.

with rails you are learning 1. how to use a framework 2. how
to program ruby 3. how to write html, post forms… 4. how to
access databases… and so on and so forth. It is all mixed
together. I know C and some Ruby, and I have trouble because
I don’t know much web programming. I would think you would
hurt even more than I do.

3

It’s not a choice, it’s work! :wink: Research work, but still work.
I learned about web programming and so on in a academic contest
anyway, so im not completly ignorant of that, since now im doing good
i think… So far the main problem is browser specific behave of
haldling requests … as you can read in another thred :-/

2006/2/6, anne g [email protected]:

Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails

–
Maurizio Marek
[email protected]

4

On Monday 06 Feb 2006 15:45, Marek wrote:

It’s not a choice, it’s work! :wink: Research work, but still work.
I learned about web programming and so on in a academic contest
anyway, so im not completly ignorant of that, since now im doing good
i think… So far the main problem is browser specific behave of
haldling requests … as you can read in another thred :-/

You’ll be OK… just take it in small steps and follow lots of
tutorials,
especially in the “Agile Web D. With Ruby On Rails” book:

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails/index.html

I guess Rails doesn’t have the immediacy of hacking something together
in PHP,
but in the long run, it will make you a much better web programmer IMHO,
rather than leave you with a big pile of nasty hacks and mish-mashed
syntax.

Also, once you get going, it really does become a LOT quicker to put
together
a basic site. When I initially started Rails, I could only see myself
using
it on bigger projects, but now I’ve used it on small projects too, and
it’s
still perfectly suited to that.

PHP is OK, but it really gives you too much rope to hang yourself on.
Rails
is very structured, and uses “tough love” to force you to do it “The
Rails
Way”… with the ultimate result being nice code that’s very easy to
manage
(once you’ve figured out what goes where).

Incidentally, I’m supposed to be teaching someone else how to use Rails
(from
scratch) in just under two weeks time - we’re going to attempt to
rebuild a
community website in one day… not quite sure it’s doable (though the
layout
etc. stays the same), but it should be fun nonetheless!

All the best,

~Dave

–

Dave S.
Rent-A-Monkey Website Development

PGP Key: http://www.rentamonkey.com/pgpkey.asc

5

On 2/6/06, Marek [email protected] wrote:

I just subscribed to this list and i just wanted to say hello before
starting dumb questions about rails. I just started my programming
career with a ruby’n’rails application here in italy and i could use
some help, and in time, when i will be more skilled, i will be glad to
give some help back :wink: See you!

I love the confidence;-)

vivek

6

Hi Marek and welcome to this list!

aside from the agile web development with rails book, you may want to
have a
look at the following titles :

https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/programming-ruby-2nd-edition/ for ruby
itself

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_ltp/index.html for the
programming stuff in general

And I’ll provide a bit of feedback:

  • a friend of mine had tried many times to start programming on various
    environments (java, c++ etc) but could not make it. With ruby and ruby
    on
    rails though, he managed to achieve what he needed and was quite
    surprised
    by the ease of code. I’ve come to realize that ruby is quite a good tool
    for
    programming education (one negative point is that you will suffer and
    find
    yourself moving slowly if you move to java, c# or c++ after that :wink:
  • I first started groking into ruby on rails only to realize it was
    probably
    better to start writing samples of pure ruby code first. This way you
    don’t
    mix ruby and ruby on rails, and learn a lot of things (I found it’s a
    bit
    faster to just write sample ruby code or play with irb rather than
    setting
    up a small ror application). Then when you actually start programming
    ruby
    on rails you have a broader view and a more accute sense of what’s
    happening.

hope this helps

Thibaut

[blog] http://www.dotnetguru2.org/tbarrere