I’ve spent this past week reading the Ruby4Rails book, and for the most
part, it’s great. After the initial introduction on rails, and the
indepth ruby information, it takes me back to the rails stuff, which i
was looking forward to all week
However, it soon becomes hard to follow and seems to miss steps out? All
of a sudden, I’m told to have the composer.country in my view, but my
composer model doesn’t know about a country(easy enough to fix i know).
but then there are other similar things which help my lose my way again.
Maybe I just need to take a day or two away from reading it, then go
back to it fresh. Failing that, are there any other materials I might
read before going back to this, to become more familiar with rails?
I’ve spent this past week reading the Ruby4Rails book, and for the most
part, it’s great. After the initial introduction on rails, and the
indepth ruby information, it takes me back to the rails stuff, which i
was looking forward to all week
However, it soon becomes hard to follow and seems to miss steps out? All
of a sudden, I’m told to have the composer.country in my view, but my
composer model doesn’t know about a country(easy enough to fix i know).
but then there are other similar things which help my lose my way again.
The composer table has a ‘country’ column – so every composer
automatically has a country attribute that can be retrieved with
composer.country and set with composer.country = “France” (plus
composer.save). That’s part of the coolness of ActiveRecord: every
column in the table becomes an attribute of the corresponding Ruby
object.
Maybe I just need to take a day or two away from reading it, then go
back to it fresh. Failing that, are there any other materials I might
read before going back to this, to become more familiar with rails?
You could look at Agile Web D. with Rails, which is sort of
the inverse of my book (in terms of Ruby/Rails ratio) and therefore
complements it very well. But by all means keep reading R4R, and feel
free to bring up any puzzlements you encounter.
In case you weren’t already aware, you can also download a zip of the
source code from the publisher’s website
(http://www.manning-source.com/books/black/black_R4RCode.zip). Maybe
it’s cheating to start with the finished product but I always end up
making mistakes (typos, skipped lines) when I re-type from the book.
This tip doesn’t directly speak to your post, but I’m also working
through r4r and I find that it helps me focus better when I’m not
having to troubleshoot mistakes I’ve introduced into the code examples.
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed r4r. I started out with Agile v2 (beta)
but found the organization of the content in r4r much easier to follow
and really felt like I was grasping the concepts introduced. Then
again, I’m a total beginner at programming and rails. Agile is
definitely worth taking a look at, especially the v2 pdf beta as it
covers the latest stuff going into Rails 1.2. I hope there is a new
edition of r4r in the works to bring it up to date, but the current
edition is still a helpful introduction.
I started with AWDWR v1. It was (and is also in v2) good, but I did not
appreciate how much magic was Rails versus how much was Ruby. In
combination with R4R, I was able to sort it out and have a clearer
appreciation of Ruby one one hand and Rails on the other.
Each is indispensable to me.
Pickaxe is great for digging deep into the Ruby magic. If you want to
dig deep into Rails, the API manual is the way to go.
I did not worry too much when I read the book first time. I read it very
fast. The second reading
was very slow with irb session always running the examples. Everything
has become more clear and I
am able to retain the material by grasping the basic concepts.
I had few weeks break between the first reading and the second.
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