OH and wrt books - a warning! I started out with Agile Web Dev like a lot of people. And while it gives you a great introduction to rails i think it encourages a particular bad behaviour that's common in rails, which i call 'addicted to the magic'. Rails is a very magical framework - lots of stuff 'just works', and the mechanisms of this working are hidden from the programmer. This is great for demonstrating how to make a blog app in fifteen minutes, as DHH famously did, but when something goes wrong, you are screwed because you're addicted to the magic - you don't have the first principles knowledge needed to get yourself out of the hole. I really felt myself get bitten by this many times when I was starting out, since i was learning rails first and picking up ruby as i went along, which is the wrong order. Walk before you can run, right?
Now, i'm not saying that rails itself is bad because of this. I'm saying that it's bad practise to jump straight into rails without having an understanding of ruby. And i'm not saying that Agile Web Dev is a bad book either - it's a great recipe book and a great walkthrough of how rails works. But, i'd actually recommend, for a beginner, Ruby for Rails by David A Black (a frequent contributor to this forum): it will give you a better understanding of what you are really doing. Even now i answer questions by people who don't even understand the client-server paradigm: ie, that rails runs on a server and sends standard html back to web browsers which have no knowledge of rails. People ask things like 'how can i get rails to refresh the page when the user does something' - as if it was a desktop app. So there's a lot of people making rails apps who don't really understand what they're doing. Again, this isn't a reason to not use rails - people fall into this trap because it's so good at what it does. It's just a warning to someone who looks like they're about to start down the rails road. Anyway, good luck, and have fun. Oh, and look at some other web frameworks besides rails! It will broaden your horizons. :) max -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
