Tag Archives: rails

Studying Up On Ruby

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Photo by rbieber

I’ve been focusing on Ruby a lot over the past 3 days (Rails specifically). What a great environment to work in!

This was taken about a month ago. I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading and experimenting with Rails and I have to say, I love it. While I’m still at the stage of figuring out “how” to do things, once you do it you get why its done that way. That can’t be said for many environments.

Ruby on Rails – WOW

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Over the last couple of weeks I decided to re-familiarize myself with the Ruby programming language. I was first introduced to it back in 2002-2003 at OOPSLA (or was it the Software Development Conference?) when I took a full day workshop with the Pragmatic Programmers, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt.

Back then I loved the language, but decided not to focus on it since the support in the form of libraries just weren’t there like they were for Python at the time. I wrote a few programs in Ruby, but left it to the side and focused on Python.

Well, those days are over. When I started with Ruby, I decided to take a look at Ruby on Rails as well. Over the last couple of weeks all of my spare time has been focused on learning the Ruby language and this completely awesome framework, even at the expense of regular podcasts.

First off, I’m absolutely enamoured by the language. So much so that with Rails piled onto it I couldn’t imagine programming in any other language. For quite a while I’ve hated Java and the complexity that it brings to projects. There’s just too much work involved in doing Java development anymore.

Ruby combines complete object orientation with the flexibility of a scripting language. Some of the features it has baked into it, such as iterators and blocks make life so much easier.

Now pile Rails on top of it. Rails is an elegant MVC framework written in the Ruby Language by the folks over at 37 signals. These two things combined make for the perfect programming environment for web applications.

I’m still on the steep end of the learning curve. I’ve got the Programming Ruby : The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide and Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (The Facets of Ruby Series) constantly at my side as I pull my hair out trying to learn all of this stuff.

But the cool thing is, even with my unfamiliarity with the language I’m still productive. If that isn’t the sign of a great development environment, I don’t know what is.

I’m working diligently to become proficient in the language. Rails is a little complex and I’m still struggling to learn all of the conventions. However, I think most of my programming moving forward will be with these tools. Its just a lot easier to spend time thinking about the problems you are trying to solve and being able to express them eloquently rather than struggling with the complexity and code/compile/run process baked into Java development.