On Dec 7, 2011, at 12:14 PM, stephen d. wrote:
therefore I need to go ahead and get used to it while learning.
know what happens. If i get it working, I will put up a detailed
article on a blog so as to save the next poor newbie. However, the fact
that it is necessary is truly sad. It is what I hate about open source.
I’m going to respond but recognize that this is simply my view and I am
reasonably sure it isn’t universally shared.
Rails has a whole lot going for it - primarily the ruby language and the
code structures inured by the language itself. It’s reasonably simple to
view the code months/years later and know what it does, relatively
simple to structure and it’s object oriented so beautifully that it
completely lends itself to modularity.
The Rails framework has incorporated the best of programming principles
bringing into play integrated testing, MVC, sensible class structures,
etc.
Owing no doubt to the incredible success of Rails, there has been
continual refactoring to the point where there is a large amount of
fragmentation which leads to a whole lot of blogs that have outdated if
not inaccurate information and sometimes Googling for solutions can be
more problematic than one would believe. Thus if you want to blog about
your realizations, by all means go for it but it’s entirely possible
that 6 months to a year from now, it will be largely irrelevant to the
then current version.
Speaking of versions, Rails has just moved to the latest incarnation
which is known as 3.1 and it has some significant changes from earlier
versions - especially if you are looking at notions/blogs/code/books
that are considering Rails 2.x Thus one of the most important things to
track is that if you have chosen a particular book or methodology for
learning Rails, you should take care to ensure that the version of rails
you use matches the guide.
Colin touched upon the notion of Windows and Rails which is always a
sore topic. The reality is that most of the ruby gems, most of the
requisite libraries tend to be built on the fly where Macintosh & Linux
come with the GCC/C++ compiler and Windows sort of relies upon having
binaries ready to roll. Worse is that the original developers seemed to
be all Macintosh users who developed on Mac’s and deployed on Linux and
Windows support has been relegated to a relatively smaller number of
people which has caused some lag. Then Ruby on Windows seems to gag when
installed/run from paths with spaces in them and is just generally
slower which also becomes a disincentive.
So I think it is fair to say that at this point, there is a relatively
high barrier to use for Windows users and generally the recommendation
is if possible, run a VMWare or VirtualBox install of some Linux… not
because it’s dead simple to get going (it isn’t) but the barriers are
lessened. Also - FWIW - I think a majority of Rails developers started
with the AWDWROR (Agile Web D. With Ruby on Rails) book -
essentially the Bible for Rails… dead tree form seems to be on 2.x and
the latest eDoc I think is up to 3.1 and though it’s basic, it is a
reasonably fast run through (2 days perhaps) and you have a really good
footing for starting out.
Craig