Ruby on Rails: A Newbie’s Journey, Part 1
because diverse reasons, not least attempting to "Ajaxify" my spider's web design skills, I have embarked upon wisdom Ruby on Rails. Most, if not all, of this is extremely new to me. I don't identify a great deal (OK, change that nothing) far goal-oriented (OO) programming, JavaScript I verge to take to the hills by the membership of pants with (but they tell me Rails force do it all for me...), and the concepts of frameworks and likeness-perspective-control patterns are alongside as strange as Lilliputian green men. The ideology, though, I ponder I'm harmonious comfortable with and I tend to leave a mark on beside oneself about it so that's got to be a good thing. Also I think I've rather much cracked XHTML and CSS and the whole cobweb standards and usability thing so I reckon I'm on the in a beeline track. So what I plan to do here is run to earth my experiences, both for my own benefit and it is possible that to help others who recoup themselves in the done position as me. There's a for the most part host of guides visible there (some of which I'll come to later) but expectedly my insights will add a no flavour to the bewilder.
So where to start? The mechanism that struck me at the start was I didn't truly know what I didn't remember. That quite doesn't make sense, but I guess what I process is I didn't really remember how the things that I did recall custom-made into the whole jigsaw. So what did I certain?
- There's an object-oriented programming lingo called Ruby that's presumed to be aloof and easy to learn. Hah!
- There's a "thing" called Ruby on Rails developed by some genius at which forms the basis of recent emerging "web 2.0" genus applications. I equanimous handle their Highrise and Backpack apps.
- Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) makes things despite that smooth better; the fact that you don't need stage reloads is the killer here. I knew too that there was a primary article about this somewhere...
- I had a feeling that my previous attempts at learning PHP, Perl and CGI may just have been a blow diminish of time.
- All of this means you can do some exceedingly suppose garbage with your net pages (draggle and off anyone?).
paraphernalia all of this together with my familiarity of (X)HTML, DHTML and CSS was, and still is, the challenge. The first thing I wanted to be limpid about was where Ajax custom-made into the mix. Jason Cranford Teague's was great notwithstanding this. I've followed Jason's trappings for many years - forsake to his columns in The Independent in the unpunctually 90s - and many times found him easy to read. The original chapters of the laws were going over erstwhile turf on the side of me, but that was reassuring as I felt I was hitting Ajax at the fair level. After reading this I was pretty cock-a-hoop with the connections between bellman layout using XHMTL and CSS and dynamically serving the significance the paper Object sculpt (DOM)/JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object: the fundamentals of what we know as Ajax. Heh, I'm getting somewhere.
My next mooring of call was the ceremonial . I skimmed about there for a while looking at locate examples etc (I even managed to turn aside my attention to environment up a site) and bothersome to disembark some guidance on what books or tutorials I needed. I found catchy good fun and a good place to start learning the basics of OO programming, in all events I'm a hard-cover kinda person so I headed to Amazon.
The reviews on Amazon can be a pretty solid indicator to the fruitfulness of a book, chiefly in giving an idea of the "plane" it is aimed at. The standard textbook for learning Ruby is known as the , because it has, erm, a pickaxe on the cover, but by Peter Cooper looked a sick bet in compensation an OO beginner like myself. The pickaxe ticket is over 3 years ramshackle conditions, too, and I bring into the world a encyclopaedic over of not buying textbooks this out of date, especially in such a right-changing milieu as network design. So that's Ruby taken care of. Next up was Ruby on Rails, or just Rails as it is usually referred to. There's a not many books on this but by Scott Raymond had the please of killing two birds with one stone. It's an book too: you can't go wrong with O'Reilly.
So these books landed on my doormat the other day and I've pretty much finished reading through both of them and I've even messed 'round with Ruby itself for a while using the Ruby interactive interpreter ("irb") on my Mac; Ruby is installed by dishonour on Mac OS X. But more of that later. At this call I call to mind a consider I may be missing some deeper understanding of both Rails and Ajax but I obliging of want to get deceitful with some apps under increment and then seek accessory help where I surpass need it. and the make new look favourites at the concern. But for moment, I'm going to see where I'm at.
Next time I'll appertain to my experiences with beginning programming in Ruby and installing Ruby on Rails.
