Ashley Baxter

I'm a 23 year old Director from the West Coast of Scotland. I run a small business, play a lot of video games, eat scones with jam, and wonder why I'm not obese.

I Want To Delve Back Into Ruby

I Want To Delve Back Into Ruby

Last year I set aside some time to get hands on with Ruby on Rails. I have several ideas for work related web apps that I believe could benefit our customers. We could offer them free with every new let policy, giving potential customers an extra incentive to take out cover with us. Not to mention it’s something fun for me to learn and experiment with.

I took about a week off from my usual work schedule. I chatted to a few programmers, and every one was of the same consensus; RoR is piss easy to learn! One guy even told me he was coding his first web app the same day. So, seeing as I tend to pick these things up relatively quickly, I figured the learning curve wouldn’t be too steep.

Yeah. Umm, I was wrong. I followed a few tutorials after spending too much time actually searching for up-to-date RoR techniques. Most were out of date, which I didn’t realise until about a quarter of the way through. Doh. Eventually, after many a headache (and copious amounts of coffee), I completed my first Ruby on Rails web app after closely following an up-to-date tutorial, and I thought I was kinda starting to get it.

So, what better way to further your skills than to get your hands dirty? After that I started building the web app I had dreamt up in my head for work. I didn’t get too far. Okay, I didn’t get far at all. Because, as it turns out, I really needed to follow more tutorials and familiarise myself with RoR even more so. But, like I said, most tutorials are dated.

Steep learning curve (for me at least) aside, I think I’ve left it long enough that I’ll actually have to start from scratch. It’s OK, though, as I’m serious about learning this. For as much basic front-end coding I have to do for my job, I think I’d have much more fun doing back-end stuff. But… Where exactly do I go from here?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Work.
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4 Responses to “I Want To Delve Back Into Ruby”

  1. Andrzej Says:

    February 25th, 2009 at 8:40 pm

    I also had a quick romance with RoR, but decided to “break the relationship”.

    I’ve decided to stay with PHP for now, mostly because of very cheap and easy to get hosting and the amount of information in the internet.

    Since you haven’t digged that deep into RoR, you should spend 1-2 days digging into PHP and especially CakePHP framework. It has that name for a reason ;) – easy as pie, and very powerfull. A RoR programmer that I worked with told me even that it’s quite similar.

    I can bet you a tasty bottle of wine (or whatever you’d like), that you’ll get the hang of it in a snap, and coding apps will be like a breeze.

    Cheers! ;)

  2. admin Says:

    February 26th, 2009 at 9:26 am

    Andrzej! My favourite developer :) I did initially intend to learn PHP rather than RoR, but like I said, everyone was saying RoR was so easy to pick up! Not the case for me. I do have a book on PHP, which I’ve always meant to get stuck into. I don’t know; I guess I need to give this more thought.

  3. James Fleeting Says:

    February 26th, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    I know I was one you talked to, and for me rails was a steep learning curve, I had a pretty hard time with it the first couple of weeks, but after buying several books and tons of research, the past couple of months have been smooth in rails coding and it gets very easy. Believe me, if you can get past the the first hill, it is nice.

    As for RoR vs php, thats kinda hard. I started in php and still code it for clients, its just RoR only at my job. RoR is a framework that provides a lot. ActiveRecord makes interacting with a database really easy. You don’t need to know sql at all, no writing sql queries (unless you get into some intense db stuff), the form helpers are simple forms, and plugins available means you can get a base app up and running in no time. php on the other hand, is a language, so to get the same kind of features as RoR you would need to learn a php framework as well (cakephp, etc).

    As Andrzej said though, with php its easy to find cheap hosting just about anywhere. With Rails it can get a little more costly. So, really its just a choice. Both have plus sides as php is widely used, lots of books, lot of forums, tutorials, opensource apps to learn from, etc.

    Let me know if you do dive back into Ruby. :)

  4. RoR Is Going Well. Kind Of. | Ashley Baxter Says:

    May 1st, 2009 at 8:45 am

    [...] of days has seen me making a(nother) serious attempt with Ruby on Rails. Like I mentioned before, a vast majority of tutorials are dated, meaning you can learn a little about what you’re doing here and there, but then get stumped [...]

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