On Dec 7, 2011, at 12:14 PM, stephen d. wrote: > I appologize and agree. It was the end of two full days of frustrations > and I should have been more polite to those who were taking their > valuable time to try and help me. > > I am new to the world of Rails and began by installing all the latest > versions of things: Ruby 1.9.3, Rails 3.1.3, and MySQL 5.5.17 (Windows > 7 64 bit). > > I did a few tutoritals using SQLite and it is indeed very nice. > However, I know that I will need to use Rails with MySQL for production, > therefore I need to go ahead and get used to it while learning. > > Coming from the C#/Silverlight development world where things are highly > integrated and just work, I'm finding that the promise that Ruby on > Rails is fast and fun to be untrue(and I know this will bring much > flack.. but its true). I asked my colleque (a very experienced developer > as well) to try to do a "hello world" application in rails using MySQL.. > after many many hours of installing, reinstalling, reading blogs, etc.. > no bananana. Honestly, I find that very disappoining. > > I will try the detailed advice above (thank you for it) and let you guys > know what happens. If i get it working, I will put up a detailed > article on a blog so as to save the next poor newbie. However, the fact > that it is necessary is truly sad. It is what I hate about open source. ---- I'm going to respond but recognize that this is simply my view and I am reasonably sure it isn't universally shared.
Rails has a whole lot going for it - primarily the ruby language and the code structures inured by the language itself. It's reasonably simple to view the code months/years later and know what it does, relatively simple to structure and it's object oriented so beautifully that it completely lends itself to modularity. The Rails framework has incorporated the best of programming principles bringing into play integrated testing, MVC, sensible class structures, etc. Owing no doubt to the incredible success of Rails, there has been continual refactoring to the point where there is a large amount of fragmentation which leads to a whole lot of blogs that have outdated if not inaccurate information and sometimes Googling for solutions can be more problematic than one would believe. Thus if you want to blog about your realizations, by all means go for it but it's entirely possible that 6 months to a year from now, it will be largely irrelevant to the then current version. Speaking of versions, Rails has just moved to the latest incarnation which is known as 3.1 and it has some significant changes from earlier versions - especially if you are looking at notions/blogs/code/books that are considering Rails 2.x Thus one of the most important things to track is that if you have chosen a particular book or methodology for learning Rails, you should take care to ensure that the version of rails you use matches the guide. Colin touched upon the notion of Windows and Rails which is always a sore topic. The reality is that most of the ruby gems, most of the requisite libraries tend to be built on the fly where Macintosh & Linux come with the GCC/C++ compiler and Windows sort of relies upon having binaries ready to roll. Worse is that the original developers seemed to be all Macintosh users who developed on Mac's and deployed on Linux and Windows support has been relegated to a relatively smaller number of people which has caused some lag. Then Ruby on Windows seems to gag when installed/run from paths with spaces in them and is just generally slower which also becomes a disincentive. So I think it is fair to say that at this point, there is a relatively high barrier to use for Windows users and generally the recommendation is if possible, run a VMWare or VirtualBox install of some Linux... not because it's dead simple to get going (it isn't) but the barriers are lessened. Also - FWIW - I think a majority of Rails developers started with the AWDWROR (Agile Web Development With Ruby on Rails) book - essentially the Bible for Rails... dead tree form seems to be on 2.x and the latest eDoc I think is up to 3.1 and though it's basic, it is a reasonably fast run through (2 days perhaps) and you have a really good footing for starting out. Craig -- 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.
