Wayne Molina wrote: > ...the community > seems to have charged forward and changed its best practices, so it's > just added a whole bunch of things I need to learn as well.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. > For instance, the new thing seems to be BDD and RSpec, so I have to > learn RSpec in addition to Rails and Ruby. What's 10-years-old about that is "test-first". Write a test that fails before writing _any_ line of code. Don't just use those things as toys, and don't just write tests on the sitting duck targets that are easy to test. If a given feature requires 20 minutes of coding, but requires 2 hours of writing the test first, write the test first anyway. This is how a project sustains itself at scaling time. Further tests will _not_ require those 2 hours again! Also, while RSpec is in a growth phase, I suspect most Rails tests are in Test::Unit. Learn it. > Git is used for version > control, so that's something else. Ideally, put either git or svn into your lib/tasks/project.rake, and then run short rake commands. > RJS is out and unobtrusive stuff > is in, so that means jQuery. Hardly; JavaScript is still JavaScript. The good news there is the libraries are more pluggable, and as Rails converges with Merb they will only get more-so. > Hosting is now typically done with > Phusion Passenger, so I have to learn Apache and that. The story there is, for whatever reason, Ruby for the longest time had no module that plugged into the great A-Patchy server. When it arrived, the committee renamed it to Passenger. > Finally with > the Rails+Merb merger things are going to get shaken up even more so. Merb has a better core. > I really want to learn Rails but the community seems to just keep > jumping from one bandwagon to another without staying put long enough > for somebody who didn't come aboard in 2005-2006 to ever get to > speed. Doing Rails requires good skills with El Goog, including codesearch, including remembering to always check the date on some blog entry offering some critical tidbit of information. Any Rails book, plus that skill, will keep you in the loop. And the other good news is as Rails matures, gains converts, and becomes stable, the committee won't be able to make all these changes so often. That is the intent of the Rails-Merb merger. > Like I said I like to follow best practices because I come > from .NET and I've seen what just slapping together code can do, and > it's not pretty, so I feel like if I'm going to learn Rails, I need to > learn it right from the start, not learn the "obsolete" way of writing > it and then upgrade. Why does .NET impede "just slapping code together"? BTW that is _not_ what we do here - refer back to the "test-first" verbiage above! Oh, I remember! .NET is closed source over all of its stack, meaning it's software that attempts to control its programmers, and keep them locked in to one vendor. We don't do that. Anyone who invents a better Rails wins, so the competition keeps us honest, even as we invent conflicting libraries and systems. > Can somebody knock some sense into me in this regard? I've been > trying to learn Rails for over a year now and this is the main reason > why I can never get more than basic tutorial-style stuff going on. Do you have a client with feature requests? That helps. Also, you might then notice that most of our code _is_ tutorial level. That is the point of Lean and Agile development with such a light framework... -- Phlip http://flea.sourceforge.net/resume.html --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" 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-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
