Learning Rails

Preface

Everyone cool seems to agree: Ruby on Rails is an amazing way to build web (or heck, Web 2.0) 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 Rails’ power can be extremely painful. There’s a lot of seemingly magical behavior in Rails that works wonderfully—until one of the incantations isn’t quite right and figuring out what happened means unraveling all that work Rails did. Rails certainly makes it easier to work with databases and objects without spending forever thinking about them, but there are a lot of things to figure out before that ease becomes obvious.

If you’d rather learn Ruby on Rails more ...