Learning Rails 5

Preface

Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life: that there’s something wrong in the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me.

Morpheus, The Matrix

What is wrong in the world? Web development. It is way harder than it has to be.

Everyone cool seems to agree: Ruby on Rails is an amazing way to build web applications. Ruby is a powerful and flexible programming language, and Rails takes advantage of that flexibility to build a web application framework that takes care of a tremendous amount of work for the developer. Everything sounds great!

Except, well… all the Ruby on Rails books talk about this “Model-View-Controller” thing, and they start deep inside the application, close to the database, most of the time. From an experienced Rails developer’s perspective, this makes sense—the framework’s power lies largely in making it easy for developers to create a data model quickly, layer controller logic on top of that, and then, once all the hard work is done, put a thin layer of interface view on the very top. It’s good programming style, and it makes for more robust applications. Advanced Ajax functionality seems to come almost for free!

From the point of view of someone learning Ruby on Rails, however, that race to show off the power of Rails can be extremely painful. ...