rails beginner how-to site

rubyonrails-talk
1

I've been writing up a step-by-step guide to implementing a sample RoR site and there's enough online now to make the link worth sharing.

http://railsdotnext.com/

The text is aimed at developers who are new to Rails, so the experts on this list probably won't find it worth their time. The instructions and code samples that are online so far outline beginning a Rails project from scratch, setting up the project in Subversion, connecting to a database (PostgreSQL), installing the restful_authentication plugin (with email) and the acts_as_state_machine plugin, and setting up a stub of a web site that supports logins and forgotten password functionality.

I made (and am making) an attempt to give the reasons why things are done and to say what the code means and what it's doing in addition to just giving samples, so it's a bit more wordy than many of the other sites out there covering the same material. For those who prefer a text-based tutorial over a screencast because you can copy/paste and follow along at whatever pace you like, I hope this tutorial will be useful.

  - Aaron

2

Thank you Aaron! The rails noobs of the world indeed apreciate your initiative.

Sometimes I feel I shouldn't have started learning server side programming (or programming at all) with RoR.

The language is certainly elegant and simple, but the OO + MVC + DRY + 'Convention over configuration' concepts are a little counter intuitive to people like me who are beginning to develop their own software without previous programming experience.

Specially 'convention over configuration'.

When I follow Ror tutorials I'm usually successful in following it, but most of the time I just can't figure out exactly what I did (and people writting tutorials usually don't take the time to explain it either).

You type scaffold, and suddenly the south pole becomes theocratic state....

Figuring out the way all the information go throughout the controllers, models, views, routes and DB, and understanding a syntax that doesn't seem to be consistent all the time, and also having to understand everything that belongs to each vessel before managing to get anything to work seems a little too frustrating in my opinion.

Sometimes I looked into other people's code and just couldn't understand how a form that does not reffer to a controller or method is creating an entry on the DB (and many situations when Rails simply "hides" what it is doing by inheritance or convention).

These lacks of clue in the code usually makes me confused and I think experienced programmers who I talked with were mistaken in recomending RoR as an entry programming language (and I plead you experienced rails programmers not to do so).

No one has anything to do with my frustration, but I was feeling like sharing this in case this can be insightful.

PS: This wasn't an attempt to bash Rails, just want to point things that complete noobs don't usually get and make people think about recomending rails as an entry level language.