Newbie Blues

Q) Why did the dinosaurs really become extinct? A) They ate their
young…

It is such a pity that the BEGINNING learning resources for RoR are
now out of sync with the Applications… Trying to follow the
Linda.com tutorials (which are very well presented for newcomers) and
Agile Web Dev… we run into Rake error (fixed)… mysql default
change to sqllite3 (fixed)… then database must now be created first
(fixed)… then scaffolding issue (fixed)… now pagination… most
common solution use 1.2.6 instead… download (OK)… change spec in
environment.rb (yep no problem)… Whoops Webrick server now not
working…

Time spent on tutorial so far approx 45 mins… time spent trying to
make up for the… “oh we don’t do it that way now… never heard of
legacy before… who cares about people interested enough in the hype
to check us out mentality” 12hours… hmmm something wrong there…

Oh look daddy… there’s a T-Rex… yes honey unfortunately daddy is
too busy building websites with those other languages at the moment to
be be able to spend time watching…

What will be really interesting is the response to this post…
because for the 1 that speaks up there are 100+ silent…

For the record… I really want RoR to be the accepted first stop for
Web D… the possibilities are tremendous… but from the
starting blocks it is NOT a straightforward path…

So… Does anyone know of a simple, straightforward, BEGINNERS path to
getting started that works with Rails 2+

Cheers

The new Agile Web Dev. book that’s in beta covers Rails 2.x.

Also, http://guides.rails.info/ is up to date and pretty thorough.

–Jeremy

On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 9:18 PM, gsv [email protected] wrote:

common solution use 1.2.6 instead… download (OK)… change spec in
be be able to spend time watching…

Cheers


http://jeremymcanally.com/
http://entp.com/

My books:

http://humblelittlerubybook.com/ (FREE!)

Thanks very much… I’ll give those a try…

I have catalogued all teh steps down the path and what to avoid…
Hopefully can get a fairly smooth “Beginners do these steps” down the
track…

Cheers

On Nov 17, 3:44 pm, “Jeremy McAnally” [email protected]

gsv wrote:

Q) Why did the dinosaurs really become extinct? A) They ate their
young…

For the record… I really want RoR to be the accepted first stop for
Web D… the possibilities are tremendous… but from the
starting blocks it is NOT a straightforward path…

So… Does anyone know of a simple, straightforward, BEGINNERS path to
getting started that works with Rails 2+

Cheers

yeah, it can be frustrating.
I was going to suggest a book, and then I found it was just 1.2.
Rails 1.2+ was stepping stone to 2.x but I guess there are
differences. I came across this: Jump Start Rails | SitePoint Premium
but I don’t know if it is good or not.

Once you do get on the horse, you can then follow the changelogs
(Peak Obsession) for each new release, see or
download rails presentations, read blogs like Ryan’s Scraps (to name
one) so you can see what’s changing.

Even being on the horse can be frustrating though. I’m not
comfortable with the plugin ecosystem - but I can’t justify why. I
don’t like all the helper methods that rails provides that create an
extra layer between you and what’s going on - but thankfully, they are
just helper methods so you can pick and choose. Rails testing is
brilliant, but you’ll find yourself on a treadmill going from TDD (the
default) to BDD (rspec and friends).


Daniel B.

Thanks, I will have a look at them…

Again… For the record… in my short time around the RoR community I
have found it to be VERY helpful compared to some others that I could
mention… so it seems a land of contrasts to me… Brilliant stuff
with “omg who in their right mind would ever do that” right next to
it… maybe it isn’t but that’s first impressions for you… one thing
is that it is “interesting” no matter which way you look at it…

Cheers