Comments on: Before you Learn Rails

By: Elad Kehat

Elad Kehat — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:20:30 +0000

For someone with no programming experience who just wants to put up a web application, I’d say that Rails is the wrong platform.
PHP would be much faster to learn and you’d get faster results.
My feeling is that Rails still requires you to be a hacker in order to take full advantage of it. That may change in time – with the huge growth of the Rails community and the interest it receives. Nevertheless, for now, someone with zero or little knowledge, who just wants a simple dynamic website would be better off with a more mature platform such as PHP, that would allow him or her to cross off quite a number of points in your list as unnecessary.

By: Brian Hogan

Brian Hogan — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 20:05:11 +0000

This list is good but I’d actually like to see it ordered a bit differently. I feel that there are things you just NEED to know first, and then things that are good to know, that you can pick up later.

Needs (in order of what you should know first)
HTML
How forms and requests work on the web
How web apps work (request/response/session)
CSS
Basic SQL
RDBMS concepts
MVC pattern
Ruby

Good to know stuff
Test-driven development theory
Agile methodologies (Rails will help you learn them)
Javascript
Graphic design
Web standards / semantic markup
Apache / Lighttpd / clustered deployment
*how* to deploy
Linux / Unix

Just my .02… and keep up the good work! Nice stuff.

@floidster:
Installing Rails on Windows couldn’t be easier.. the instructions on the official site are basically for Windows users…

install one-click ruby
gem install rails –include-dependencies

That’s it. I’ve heard of people having problems with other methods, but that one works.

/spends a lot of time on Windows.

By: Satish Talim

Satish Talim — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 02:06:57 +0000

You hit the nail on the head! Good article.

By: the floidster

the floidster — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:26:42 +0000

very illuminating…

my own experience was that it was not straightforward to install rails on a windows pc

cant remember all the issues, but the point is, if it doesn’t just insall clean, no fuss, i’m not interested

those who pride themselves on how they can tweak and hack to get to square one completely miss the point

i prefer to spend my time on productive activity, not fighting my toolset

the ruby/rails guys would to well to take a cue from apache: i can download apache, tomcat, xerces, whatever, unzip, and it just works out of the box; same for mysql, php, the jdk, and even stuff form the evil empire in redmond usually installs and runs out of the box

then i can begin what i really care about, which is programmming/development, not f—–g with configuration and installation because of the amateur hour mentality of the so-called ‘alpha geeks’

By: Web Links 11.23.2006 « Rhonda Tipton’s WebLog

Web Links 11.23.2006 « Rhonda Tipton’s WebLog — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:25:55 +0000

[...] Other Development PowerShell Example for Checking PS3 Availability on Amazon Before you Learn Rails DHTML Color Picker [...]

By: JMC

JMC — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 19:37:03 +0000

To sum it up further, if you’re not a developer, then, yes, it will be hard to learn. It will require a good deal of your time. You may be able to throw something together after a tutorial or two, but I doubt it would be something that could be called an application. If you are a developer, it should be no more difficult than learning any other development framework.

By: Erinc

Erinc — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 19:21:14 +0000

Here’s the list I came up with of the things you’ll have to learn to write web applications in Rails:

I disagree with “have to learn” part. I definitely don’t need to know Ajax or js to build a web app.

By: The Geek

The Geek — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 17:22:56 +0000

This is a good article… I think that understanding Mongrel is one of the key things for building scalable Rails applications.

By: LabRat

LabRat — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 09:15:39 +0000

This is a really good article that sums it up quite nicely. It’s like any other framework a powerful glue that mixes interesting ideas with existing technology.