… and try to write some documentation
It is completely unusefull to develop, develop, develop without
documentation, tutorials etc…
Get a grip dude.
Buy the book and start coding.
Imagine all the people that started many months ago
without docs.
Are we special? No
We just loved it and STARTED
“Buy the book”…you say like this is the Bible…
You couldn’t say “buy one of the tens of great books about rails”,
right? there are 1 or 2 books everyone talks about…
documentation is just missing in rails…
peter wrote:
Get a grip dude.
Buy the book and start coding.
Imagine all the people that started many months ago
without docs.Are we special? No
We just loved it and STARTED
Bob wrote:
documentation is just missing in rails…
What more do you need? 
Here’s a list of Rails Books:
http://www.rubyonrails.com/books
The Agile book is good, recipes and ruby for rails are good as well.
In some terms I must agree with Bob.
It is really hard to find the right path. For me that I am coming from
the ASP Classic world it is even harder - because I think in a total
different way.
A couple of minutes ago I had a problem with my password in the user
account that dont needs to be validated when the user updates the
account data and dont inserts a new password and only needs to be
validated when the user enteres a new password. Ok, I found the solution
here in the forum but it looks really strange to me and I wonder how I
could get onto this solution by myself.
validates_presence_of :password, :if => :password_required?
validates_confirmation_of :password, :if => :password_required?
def password_required?
hashed_password.blank? or not password.blank?
end
I even couldnt find the “.blank?” thing and what it does. Its not avail.
in the API nor in the RUBY docs - or I am too stupid. I can imagine that
it checkes if a string is blank - but than I tried it somewhere else in
the code and it doesnt work. So I am unsure why it is not working. And
the error messages are another great mess. For me they are saying
absolutly nothing.
I am really interested in coding in rails and leave ASP for ever behind
- because the modell behavior is really great but the way is hard. Also
in the Agile Web development book are “MANY” bugs - which doesnt make it
easier.
I am sitting here since 2 Weeks and coding my first app with rails but
most of the code is from the forum - and some code I dont even know what
it is doing.
On the plus side: Its getting better every day.
Andreas - a total noob here!
Andreas S. wrote:
and one last thing:
why is there no api and docs that are searchable?
would be great-andreas
What seems to be really sad is that over $10k was collected to greatly
improve the documentation. I’ve not heard any more about those plans.
Anyone?
Bob wrote:
… and try to write some documentation
It is completely unusefull to develop, develop, develop without
documentation, tutorials etc…
The new Ruby on Rails eCommerce books just came out (Apress.com)
Other books:
Ruby for Rails (Manning.com)
Ruby on Rails up and running (oreilly.com)
Ruby on Rails 1st and 2nd additions
Rails Recipes
Ruby Cookbook (oreilly.com)
The Ruby Way 2nd Edition (just released) McGraw Hill(?)
LOTS of Ruby and Rails info out there, even more books coming out over
the next three months. Compare this to one book for TurboGears (so
far), and a yet to be finished book for Django. Rails at this point has
very solid documentation already.
With the ri browser in radrails or the rdoc widget at
http://widgets.precisionis.com.au/ you can search through the api.
Fred
Well a documentation in HTML is great. Is there some free software
avail. that can index html files to build a simple search?
To add another thing on the rails problems:
The Installation => on OS X!
it took me 5 tries and over 3 days to get it running with mysql - no
joke!
The worst thing is that you also need to be very familiar with OSx Unix
commands and that you need to compile everything. I know this is a known
practice in the opensource world - I personaly like installers. Than I
know what to deinstall.
All the things that I donwloaded and did a ‘tar xyz someting’ - I dont
know how many files are now on my mac to make ruby and rails working. I
also wonder why the download urls of those installers and tar packages
are on totaly different servers? Thats confusing? You need to be a real
geek to get that baby running. I know there is also locomotive - but I
heard it is better to compile everything so it could be better updated
later - dont know why? - at the end - I dont know how to update - is
there an update function or a magic word that i need to insert into the
shell?
For me - all the things that I done with rails are more coincidences.
problems with Textmate are also not easy to me. I wonder why most of the
keyshortcuts not working?
-andreas
There is good stuff out there. Maybe not obvious to find though, for
example getting rails up and running on OS X is dead easy with this step
by step thingy:
Dan Benjamin.
The widget I linked to earlier is pretty handy for searching through the
docs, i use it all the time.
It probably would be handy if everything was available for download from
one place, but then the people writing rails aren’t the same as the
people writing ruby, who aren’t the same as the people writing mysql who
aren’t the sames as the ones writing lighttpd.
But once you’ve got the basics you can just gem install blah for post
things
As for being a geek, well you are are a programmer after all
Fred
There is indeed very poor documentation regarding rails. I was looking
about rjs for instance, and believe me, it was very difficult for me to
find some usefull tutorials…
This is a problem with almost all open source software.
Everyone like to code, but who likes to write doc?
Frederick C. wrote:
There is good stuff out there. Maybe not obvious to find though, for
example getting rails up and running on OS X is dead easy with this step
by step thingy:
and one last thing:
why is there no api and docs that are searchable?
would be great
-andreas
thanks fred and david
the gotapi site is very usefull and the os x widget is also not bad
I am optimistic to get into rails deeper and deeper with fun
lots of things make this language a future language.
on the down side - I need to finish my app fast 
-andreas
Andreas S. wrote:
and one last thing:
why is there no api and docs that are searchable?
would be great-andreas
You can search the api’s here
http://www.gotapi.com/
or here:
I agree that it’s hard sometimes to find the “right” way to do
something, but that’s part of the fun IMO
Andreas S. wrote:
The Installation => on OS X!
it took me 5 tries and over 3 days to get it running with mysql - no
joke!
I take it you didn’t use Locomotive? Use Locomotive.
George wrote:
There is indeed very poor documentation regarding rails. I was looking
about rjs for instance, and believe me, it was very difficult for me to
find some usefull tutorials…This is a problem with almost all open source software.
Everyone like to code, but who likes to write doc?
I find this hard to believe - the first site listed in google search of
“rails rjs” has been Cody F.'s site for at least a couple of months
- you will find no better reference than his PDF booklet at O’Reilly
(linked from his site).
It is true that no one likes to write doc. As such, it should not be any
surprise that in the open source world documentation is lacking - open
source projects thrive because the people working on them enjoy it.
Absent sustaining enjoyment of doing something (which as stated is
missing when it comes to doc), there generally needs to be a profit
motive. I have no problem coming here and sharing what I know with folks
asking questions, because when I have a question I get paid back in
spades, but if I took a significant amount of time to write something on
a quality par with the likes of Fauser’s booklet, then yes I’d probably
like to be compensated for it.
On the other side of the fence, as a developer, I have no problem paying
reasonable money for really good information, and likewise I have no
tolerance for people who are reluctant to pay $10 or $20 for the same.
I’m not saying posters on this thread necessarily are those people, but
we’ve all seen posts along the lines of “that book looks good, sure, but
do you know where I can find that same high-quality, step-by-step,
teach-me-everything-I-need-to-know treasure-trove of info, but for
free?”
No, I’m sorry, I don’t.
c.
George wrote:
There is indeed very poor documentation regarding rails.
I find a lot of these statements a little hard to swallow. No, Rails
documentation is not at the level ASP or PHP documentation is, and it is
certainly not all in one place (I will admit the wiki on RoR.com really
needs to be cleaned, condensed and updated). But for someone who came
from an extremely modest PHP background, I felt there was plenty of
information available, especially for the newbie.
Getting comfortable with the API reference is a must, as is getting a
book (AWDWR is indispensible, imo). Beyond that, it takes some digging
with google, but there is a tremendous amount of articles and blogs out
there covering most major Rails topics. Not to mention this forum is
just about as valuable as anything out there. The Rails community is
extremely welcoming to new members.
So yea, it takes some effort and some patience, but if you want to start
making Rails apps, a web browser and google are your best friend.
Hopefully we can expect an avalanche of documentation patches from those
complaining here. I agree the docs are kind of sparse and lacking, but
as you figure things out, SUBMIT DOC PATCHES!!!
Joe
Cayce B.
Of course searching on google “rails rjs” will give me something about
rjs in rails…I was telling that I had some problems with rjs and I
just couldn’t find any help… this ‘fast and easy blah blah web
framework’ make me loose some time… and not because it is something
wrong with the code, but because there is no documentation, examples;
don’t tell me to search on google and find a tutorial, I had a specific
problem and doc was missing…
Believe me I found on the famous ror.com wiki, v**g_r_a ads or empty
pages, links to another empty pages, toturials for obsolete ror1.0 etc
If you want rails become more and more popular, it really must be easy
to use, using empty words (developing without pain etc) is just not
enough. If you have a problem, you have to be able to find the solution.
I couldn’t. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I am good enough just for
php or .net
Cayce B. wrote:
George wrote:
There is indeed very poor documentation regarding rails. I was looking
about rjs for instance, and believe me, it was very difficult for me to
find some usefull tutorials…This is a problem with almost all open source software.
Everyone like to code, but who likes to write doc?I find this hard to believe - the first site listed in google search of
“rails rjs” has been Cody F.'s site for at least a couple of months
- you will find no better reference than his PDF booklet at O’Reilly
(linked from his site).