What is the best way to learn rails 3.0 with no prior rails experience?

Rails
1

What is the best way to learn rails 3.0 with no prior rails or ruby
experience? I’m just curious about it and want to get started.

Do I start with 3.0 or 2.0?

If one is a very good OO developer and knows Java and Scala really
well, would it be hard to get by with rails without knowing much ruby?
(basically learning book at the same time).

Any good books that do a fantastic and thorough job at not really
explaining how an MVC works but how everything works in rails
specifically? Something that doesn’t just look at “the most basic
case”, but really gets in there above a basic CRUD app.

I was flipping through a book about rails 2.0 at Chapters and the
first 20 pages kept giving a sales pitch about how easy rails is, and
yadda yadda. It tended to rip on java a lot… but since I know Java
really well, I thought the author didn’t know what he was talking
about. His comparisons and examples of Java were biased… either
comparing it to the language itself or to frameworks that I wouldn’t
even consider using because they suck (struts, etc.). I think his goal
was to make it look worse than it really was. Spring 3.0, while not
ideal, isn’t nearly as bad as the author was letting on… and I guess
I lost confidence in the author because he didn’t even bother to
mention Spring.

Anyway, any advice to some lean yet informative and intelligent books
would be helpful. I thought the Scala book written by Martin and crew
was fantastic, so if a book exists at that caliber, I’m very open to
reading it.

Thanks

2

egervari wrote:

What is the best way to learn rails 3.0 with no prior rails or ruby
experience? I’m just curious about it and want to get started.

Do I start with 3.0 or 2.0?

If I were starting today, I’d probably learn Rails 3.

If one is a very good OO developer and knows Java and Scala really
well, would it be hard to get by with rails without knowing much ruby?
(basically learning book at the same time).

Make sure to learn enough Ruby that you can understand what’s going on.

Any good books that do a fantastic and thorough job at not really
explaining how an MVC works but how everything works in rails
specifically? Something that doesn’t just look at “the most basic
case”, but really gets in there above a basic CRUD app.

You don’t need that yet, I think. Learn the basics of the framework
first.

I was flipping through a book about rails 2.0 at Chapters and the
first 20 pages kept giving a sales pitch about how easy rails is, and
yadda yadda. It tended to rip on java a lot… but since I know Java
really well, I thought the author didn’t know what he was talking
about. His comparisons and examples of Java were biased… either
comparing it to the language itself or to frameworks that I wouldn’t
even consider using because they suck (struts, etc.). I think his goal
was to make it look worse than it really was.

I do know Java fairly well. I also know Ruby. Java is so inflexible by
comparison that I’d be quite happy never to use it again (except in the
context of something like JRuby).

The big advantage of the Rails framework (that no one talks about)
really is the Ruby language. This is why no PHP or Java framework can
compare to it IMHO.

Spring 3.0, while not
ideal, isn’t nearly as bad as the author was letting on… and I guess
I lost confidence in the author because he didn’t even bother to
mention Spring.

Which? He said it was bad or he didn’t mention it? You can’t have it
both ways.

Anyway, any advice to some lean yet informative and intelligent books
would be helpful. I thought the Scala book written by Martin and crew
was fantastic, so if a book exists at that caliber, I’m very open to
reading it.

Agile Web D. with Rails? (Never read it, since I don’t do
paper books for programming most of the time, but it is the “canonical”
book.)

Thanks

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

3

I would recommend the book Agile Web D. with Rails. I know
there is
a new version for Rails 3. I think if you do the practical tutorial
part,
which if I remember is only maybe 100-200pages, you should just jump in.
I
came from asp.net and this worked for me. Then soon you will want to
learn
more ruby but seriously, I think you can become dangerous pretty quick
with
this book if you learn well doing self directed stuff.

David

4

David K. wrote:

I would recommend the book Agile Web D. with Rails. I know
there is
a new version for Rails 3. I think if you do the practical tutorial
part,
which if I remember is only maybe 100-200pages, you should just jump in.
I
came from asp.net and this worked for me. Then soon you will want to
learn
more ruby but seriously, I think you can become dangerous pretty quick
with
this book if you learn well doing self directed stuff.

Just do all development test-first (I recommend RSpec and Cucumber;
avoid Rails’ fixtures entirely and go straight to factories). And of
course, use version control.

David

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

5

What is the best way to learn rails 3.0 with no prior rails or ruby
experience? I’m just curious about it and want to get started.

Learn Ruby first. Or at least enough Ruby that you don’t think of Rails
as being magical.

http://humblelittlerubybook.com/ - Free (donations welcome). I’ve never
read it…

The Well-Grounded Rubyist - Excellent.

Rails 3 in Action - Rails 3. Not out yet, but seems good so
far.

Disclaimer - I like manning’s books and have reviewed several. I’m sure
there are other good ones as well… I don’t get anything for it, but
there you go :slight_smile:

Do I start with 3.0 or 2.0?

3.0.

If one is a very good OO developer and knows Java and Scala really
well, would it be hard to get by with rails without knowing much ruby?
(basically learning book at the same time).

Personally I think you’ll hit the wall at “above a basic CRUD app”.
You’ll have an advantage over someone who doesn’t know any language
well, but spending a couple of days cruising through some ruby books
will certainly be time well spent.

-philip

6

egervari wrote:

Yes, I do test-first for the last 8 or so years. I am a little
familiar with RSpec’s design because ScalaTest has parts that are
blatant ripoff of RSpec :wink: I love ScalaTest, so I will probably like
RSpec.

What do you mean by factories? I know of the factory pattern, but what
do you mean specifically?

Nothing particularly closely related to the Factory pattern (which isn’t
necessary in Ruby that often). Check out the Factory Girl and Machinist
gem docs for an explanation of the idea.

Also, is it easy to disable the testing framework that is shipped with
rails and get it to use RSpec?

There’s nothing to disable. If you don’t want to write Test::Unit
tests, just don’t write any. Test::Unit and RSpec can even coexist on
the same project (as is the case at my job, since we’re switching
gradually).

Best,
–Â
Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

Sent from my iPhone

7

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

There’s nothing to disable. If you don’t want to write Test::Unit
tests, just don’t write any. Test::Unit and RSpec can even coexist on
the same project (as is the case at my job, since we’re switching
gradually).

Out of curiosity… Switching gradually in which direction? From RSpec
to Test::Unit (+various extensions e.g. Shoulda). Or are you switching
to RSpec?

I’ve been a fan of RSpec for some time. It’s what I actually started
with, but I hear a lot of buzz about various extensions to Test::Unit
these days as well. I’m just interested in hearing your thoughts.

8

Yes, I do test-first for the last 8 or so years. I am a little
familiar with RSpec’s design because ScalaTest has parts that are
blatant ripoff of RSpec :wink: I love ScalaTest, so I will probably like
RSpec.

What do you mean by factories? I know of the factory pattern, but what
do you mean specifically?

Also, is it easy to disable the testing framework that is shipped with
rails and get it to use RSpec?

9

Robert W. wrote:

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

There’s nothing to disable. If you don’t want to write Test::Unit
tests, just don’t write any. Test::Unit and RSpec can even coexist on
the same project (as is the case at my job, since we’re switching
gradually).

Out of curiosity… Switching gradually in which direction? From RSpec
to Test::Unit (+various extensions e.g. Shoulda). Or are you switching
to RSpec?

To RSpec. (I’ve been sort of pushing it, but the switch was underway
before I got here.)

I’ve been a fan of RSpec for some time. It’s what I actually started
with, but I hear a lot of buzz about various extensions to Test::Unit
these days as well. I’m just interested in hearing your thoughts.

I much prefer RSpec. Test::Unit encourages unreadable
implementation-dependent tests, at least in my experience.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

10

egervari wrote:

What is the best way to learn rails 3.0 with no prior rails or ruby
experience? I’m just curious about it and want to get started.

Get ruby 1.9.2/rails 3/gems installed - tons of tutorials out there for
a basic setup.

Buy the Pickaxe book (is it still a pickaxe for Ruby 1.9.x)

mkdir rails
cd rails
rails new testapp
cd testapp
rails g scaffold person first_name:string last_name:string

now sit down and read through the generated code to see how rails WANTS
to work.

You wouldn’t use a generated app for a real production application, but
as an educational tool, it’s a great way to get started.

Heck, I still scaffold a basic proof of concept when users come to me
for the “next great addition” to our system. They even expect the
initial forms to be ugly but workable…