Stop developing Rails!

Rails
21

don’t tell me to search on google and find a tutorial, I had a specific
problem and doc was missing…

Okay - A) in your post above, you said it was “difficult for me to find
some useful tutorials”, you didn’t say anything about trying to solve “a
specific problem”.

And B) - what I’m saying is the doc is not missing. The “useful
tutorials” are not missing. They are right there on the first site
returned from a google search. The “RJS for Rails” booklet, on sale for
$10 at O’Reilly and linked from Fauser’s home page, is the documentation
AND the tutorials you are/were looking for. It’s comprehensive and I’m
sure it would have answered your question(s), and it’s a PDF download
that you could have had in your hands in minutes. Thus my “I find that
hard to belive” comment.

Listen - I’m not trying to start a flame war - I was just responding to
the what you said. If you meant something different, it wasn’t clear
from what you posted.

c.

George wrote:

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).
22

Hi there !

There is really a problem with documentation. In fact, I can not achieve
to convert 2 guys tu use Rails at job because of lack of documentation.

The already existing doc is nice. The books helps to start. But when you
find something like add_instance_variables and can’t find any drop of
doc and source references as much unknown calls as possible, it’s quite
hard to believe.

Coding is just find. Making the doc on the fly, even if it’s not sexy,
is great. And when I read “make doc patch”, this make me laughing : how
can I write documentation for methods I even can’t figure out what it
can do ?

Giving bricks is good. Explaining how to use it and everybody can build
a house :wink:

Tony

PS : the add_instance_variables was reference from a wiki page on the
rails website … writed somewhere in a bunch of code, no explanation
why.

23

Have you actually looked at the API docs Bob? They aren’t perfect but
there is plenty of information there. Plenty of other people have learn
Rails quite successfully with the current documentation.

24

Agile Web D. With Rails = Rails bible
Programming Ruby = Ruby bible
Ruby for Rails = better understanding of what Ruby’s role in Rails is
bible
http://rails.rubyonrails.org/ = Rails API bible

Craig

25

Bob wrote:

… and try to write some documentation It is completely unusefull to
develop, develop, develop without documentation, tutorials etc…

Cool, looking forward to seeing documentation patches from you. You did
just volunteer, didn’t you?

–
Jakob S. - http://mentalized.net

26

On 11/6/06, Trace D. [email protected] wrote:

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)

How is Apress with updates to the PDF ? Looks like an interesting book.
The TOC of the O’Reilly Rails Cookbook looks great. If it’s anythign
like
the Ruby Cookbook it’s never leaving my side.

Stuart

Other books:

far), and a yet to be finished book for Django. Rails at this point has
very solid documentation already.

–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

–

27

I agree there are some good books out there. But a fuller online
documentation would be very useful.

I think there is potential if people contribute to either:

Ruby on Rails Manual http://railsmanual.org/

or

http://rdoc.caboo.se/

(Actually, a combination of the approaches from the above two sites
would be
nice.)

Something like this would be cool to develop:

At the same time, we can’t expect the Rails Devs to do all this. It’s
nice
enough of them to be putting time into developing the framework in the
first
place.

A must say though that a lack of clear documentation does make Rails
adoption difficult especially once you get past the real basics. If
you’re
saving time coding but have to spend that time googling for answers and
asking on mailing lists or experimenting with trial and error because
the
parameters for some method aren’t clearly documented, well, it gets a
little
discouraging. (That said, I’m still a Rails convert!)

On 11/6/06, Dark A. [email protected] wrote:

Ruby for Rails ( Manning.com)
very solid documentation already.
Dark ambient - Wikipedia

–
“Impossible is nothing.”

28

On 11/6/06, Andreas S. [email protected] wrote:

and one last thing:
why is there no api and docs that are searchable?
would be great

There are a few:

Ruby on Rails Manual http://railsmanual.org/

API with live-search http://api.rails2u.com/

gotAPI.com :: Reference Lookup Service
http://www.gotapi.com/index.html

–
“Impossible is nothing.”

29

You are severely disturbed if you think that Google and the (current)
API docs are all you need to learn Rails. I don’t think API docs are a
good place to point newbies; I think RDocs are great for people who
“get it” but need a little nudging.

I agree with the OP. Rails’ docs suck for over half of the people who
are going to come to Rails. This is why we have a lot people asking
questions on the mailing list that could/should be answered by quality
documentation. I’m working on trying to fix this documentation
conundrum that with my books, but I’m only one person and the
featureset is so fluid that it’s hard (at this point, impossible) to
keep up.

I think it’s kind of ridiculous to ask someone to pay $40 for book to
be able to use your framework because your documentation is terrible.
I really hope that the documentation drive takes off and produces
something useful.

I apologize for the rant.

–Jeremy

30

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On Nov 6, 2006, at 10:01 AM, Andreas S. wrote:

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.

I think this is probably the most insightful point… Rails is an
extraction of ideas and what DHH (and many others) consider to be
best practices. So for many of us, it is easy to find the answers,
because we already think that way. I’ve rarely had any problem
finding what I need, and IRC usually provides the rest. But just
before rails came about, I already was looking for ways to do things
this way; rails just did it first and better. :slight_smile:

I even couldnt find the “.blank?” thing and what it does. Its not
avail.

IIRC, blank? was added in recent edge rails, so if you are using the
stable release, it may not be there. Same caveat if you have bought
the beta version of “Agile Programming with Rails”. I wonder if
some of the forum and wiki pages also suffer from this. People need
to be clear what version they are using; due to the incredibly fast
pace of development, I suspect a lot of people are using edge rails.

  • 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.

Again, what version of rails and what version of that book?

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.

As I said before, I think the biggest issue is learning to think in a
different way. It’s sorta like the transition from being a procedural
programmer to a OO programmer.

David M.
Maia Mailguard http://www.maiamailguard.com
[email protected]

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31

On Nov 6, 2006, at 7:30 AM, Jeremy McAnally wrote:

I think it’s kind of ridiculous to ask someone to pay $40 for book to
be able to use your framework because your documentation is terrible.

Though it’s not ridiculous to pay $40 for a book that will teach you to
use a framework that has less than ideal documentation, if buying that
book and using that framework might save you more time per day, and
therefore make you more money per day, than the book will cost you,
assuming you charge about 1 book/hour. :slight_smile:

–
– Tom M., CTO
– Engine Y., Ruby on Rails Hosting
– Reliability, Ease of Use, Scalability
– (866) 518-YARD (9273)

32

Right, but many poor students like myself can’t shovel out that kind
of money at every little piece of tech that flights our fancy. If I
can’t tell that it’s going to save me money (i.e., by using it in a
real situation), then I’m not going to shovel the money out.

Fortunately, I’ve been doing web development for a while, so I picked
up on enough basics to know that Rails could save me a butt load of
time. But I know other people who have been doing app development for
a while or don’t know anything about web development who refuse to
pick up Rails because they don’t see the benefit in it, mostly
because they don’t understand enough about it to put it into use and
gauge it’s usefulness.

–Jeremy

33

Here’s an update:
http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2006/10/27/doc-project-update

Watch their blog for updates. After reading that I feel no more
educated about where the money went/is going, but at least it’s
something.

–Jeremy

34

On documentation: I’ve found the following CHM version of the Rails API
to
be very helpful. Quick and easy to search. View with xCHM on *nix.

http://delynnberry.com/2006/10/16/rails-chm-documentation-version-1-1-6

On 11/6/06, Jeremy McAnally [email protected] wrote:

a while or don’t know anything about web development who refuse to

I think it’s kind of ridiculous to ask someone to pay $40 for book to
– Engine Y., Ruby on Rails Hosting
– Reliability, Ease of Use, Scalability
– (866) 518-YARD (9273)

–
“Impossible is nothing.”

35

“The worst thing is that you also need to be very familiar with OSx
Unix
commands and that you need to compile everything”

No offence but I find it slightly annoying when I read this. You’re
meant to be a programmer for crying out loud! Why do you need a
graphical UI to hold your hand? If you don’t know your way around a
Unix terminal - learn!

No programmer worth their salt should be afraid of getting down and
dirty with the terminal, or learning how to do so.

36

Hello David,

I even couldnt find the “.blank?” thing and what it does. Its not
avail.

IIRC, blank? was added in recent edge rails, so if you are using the
stable release, it may not be there.

#blank? is in ActiveSupport since 1.2.1, so it’s in Rails since 0.14.1.

-- Jean-François.

–
À la renverse.

37

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Jeremy McAnally wrote:

But I know other people who have been doing app development for
a while or don’t know anything about web development who refuse to
pick up Rails because they don’t see the benefit in it, mostly
because they don’t understand enough about it to put it into use and
gauge it’s usefulness.

That is their problem. There is enough information on the web pointing
out the usefulness of Rails. It took myself and others in
my company under an hour, almost 2 years ago now to run a simple demo
which showed us the immediate benefit of using Rails and
ActiveRecord over JBoss and Hibernate given our requirements.

If you want to evangelize rails then do so, but don’t push for the rails
core team or DHH to write beginner level documentation
just to open the eyes of people who are too stubborn to check it out.

I think it’s kind of ridiculous to ask someone to pay $40 for book to
be able to use your framework because your documentation is terribl

You say you a poor college student, I am sure you’ve made worse
decisions with your loan money then spending $20 for the PDF or
$40 for the book.

It is great that Rails is an open source free agile web framework. It is
sad that so many people who want to make money using it
expect that everything should be handed to them for free.

And if your take on books that cost money is because the documentation
sucks, I am so glad that Ruby or Rails doesn’t need 1000+
books (like Java or anything .NET) just to show you how the language and
it’s libraries work.

In a way I like the lack of beginner level documentation. I know it
limits the growth of Ruby and/or Rails, but you at least get
people who you know actually understand the langauge/technology and not
those who just know how-to copy/paste.

Zach
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38

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?

$10. I haven’t read it though, but seems to be what you want.

39

yeah, I agree. Tutorial and API alone is not enough. Rails is just a
web dev framework in Ruby. so Ruby is must before even trying Rails.

I found that “The Little Book of Ruby” was very helpful in learning
enough Ruby to be able to read Rails code. Then went to
rubyonrails.org tutorial page and tried all tutorial there. And then
went to Barns and Noble got Ruby Cookbook (couldn’t wait 3 day
shipping from amazon) and read chapter 15. Then finally I was able to
consume Rails API documentation and have fun, having fun, of course I
am happy.

It took me 3 weeks for this, with 2 kids and 1 wife screaming at you
all the time and full time work during the day. pretty good no? :slight_smile:

now I have to think about how to make living with Rails.

–

  1. read “The Little Book of Ruby”
  2. do all Tutorial from rubyonrails.org
  3. read Ruby Cookbook from Oreilly Chapter 15 (US $49.99).
  4. read Rails API
40

If you want to evangelize rails then do so, but don’t push for the rails core team or DHH to write beginner level documentation

I’m not pushing the core team; they’re too busy writing code (at least
they should be! ;). I’m not really pushing anyone. All that’s needed
is an open, introductory text. It shouldn’t be this hard, especially
since the community invested thousands of dollars in something that
hasn’t seen the light of day yet (even though i’m sure they’re working
on it).

just to open the eyes of people who are too stubborn to check it out.

That’s a completely false blanket statement. I’ve worked in computer
science departments and companies where people were Java and PHP
whizzes, but couldn’t understand the whole concept of architecture
patterns or HTTP and web applications. I wouldn’t say they’re
stubborn, they just need more cottling. It’s stupid and arrogant to
say, “Well if they don’t get it, they’re just stubborn.”

You say you a poor college student, I am sure you’ve made worse decisions with your loan money then spending $20 for the PDF or
$40 for the book.

Heh, yeah. I’m sure single college students probably do, but being
married and having to actually pay bills with a monthly income that
can be described as dismal (i.e., like half the poverty level), it’s
very difficult for me to release that much money for something like a
book about a web development framework.

In a way I like the lack of beginner level documentation. I know it limits the growth of Ruby and/or Rails, but you at least get
people who you know actually understand the langauge/technology and not those who just know how-to copy/paste.

That’s just selfish and, really, childish. “Let’s keep the stupids
out!” Sheesh.

Again I say, this is the attitude that makes people hate Perl.

–Jeremy