Because it's $30-40? I always hated the fact that to really get into Rails I had to shell out for a book. Every time I looked for narrative documentation of any sort, I was always pointed to a random blog or the book (usually the latter). It actually sort of instilled this weird, totally unfounded distrust of DHH in me for a while because his name was on the cover, so it seemed like a ploy to make money. Stupid? Yes. Uncommon? I don't think so.
All that's to say: I think it's dumb to have to spend a decent sum of money to really be able to use Rails. As for starting a book, there's the start to an open source book on Rails here: http://www.railsdocumentation.org/book.html It's out of date and not a lot of content at this point, but I'd love to get a group of people working around that to get it into shape. Maintenance wouldn't be horrible if we tried to keep up with the major Rails releases (1.1, 1.2, 2.0, etc., not 2.0.1 necessarily). It's written in Markdown so far, so it shouldn't be horrible to get a lot of people working on it. Anyone interested in working on that or making concerted efforts on the API docs (or anything else)? Ping me off list, on IRC (in #rails-doc), or find me at a conference. :) I've got a Basecamp, Lighthouse, blah blah blah to coordinate all the efforts. --Jeremy On Dec 14, 2007 5:42 AM, Sandofsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > What's wrong with just directing new people to "Agile Web Development > with Rails"? > > So long as you keep the API documentation up to date, I think > professional, fulltime writers and educators can write better > introductory documentation than any of us. > > > On Dec 14, 2:02 am, August Lilleaas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I disagree that a forum and/or mailing list rocks - it's good enough, > > but it's not awesome. Having a system where questions are tagged and > > moderated is very different. > > > > Also, keep in mind what kind of questions people might have. In IRC, > > some guy wondered why restful_authentication didn't work. He had > > installed the plugin, and login/logout worked, but "a users could > > still see the posts other users have made". When I told him that he > > needed to change the finders in the controller to find the posts from > > the current user (current_user.posts), he said "that didn't work" - > > because he hadn't set up a Post.belongs_to :user and > > User.has_many :posts. He had no idea on how to achieve this. > > > > You could say that this was pretty retarded, and I would agree. He > > simply didn't understand anything about how rails works, and when I > > told him that he needed to set up the associations, he came back to me > > and asked why he got all these error messages - he hadn't added a > > user_id column to the posts table, and didn't understand why he had to > > do that. Still, after some moderations and tagging, and with an added > > write-up on how to do what he wanted to do - authenticate users and > > then scope finders by the current user - would be a good resource for > > rails beginners. You could argue that it's not up to the core team to > > document usage of plugins, but then again why not? Most Rails books > > include some plugin usage, and pretty much all rails apps are using > > plugins anyway. > > > > I could just get at it, and make this railsbeginners.com, but that's > > pointless because of the reasons mentioned above - we don't need > > another one-man doc site, we need a doc team, listed on > > rubyonrails.com/core. > > > > On Dec 14, 9:38 am, Michael Klishin > > > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > But it may not get right feel of the framework for a newcomer, and as > > > long as Rails is opinionated software, Djangish kind of a book may be > > > a good idea to fill in this gap. > > > > > On 14 дек. 2007, at 10:02, Manfred Stienstra wrote: > > > > > > Long story short: good API docs, good examples, screencasts, blog > > > > posts and a forum/mailinglist seem like the way to go and I think > > > > we're already pretty well supplied in those areas. > > > > > > Manfred > > > > > MK > > > -- http://www.jeremymcanally.com/ My books: Ruby in Practice http://www.manning.com/mcanally/ My free Ruby e-book http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/ My blogs: http://www.mrneighborly.com/ http://www.rubyinpractice.com/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
