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So I am leaving a job that is solely Java stack, and moving to one that doesn't outwardly admit it, but they are absolutely Ruby/Rails crazy.
I understand Ruby fine, but "Rails" doesn't seem to be much more than an MVC framework which the Ruby language is placed upon.
I'm sure there are plenty of people rolling over right now wondering how I could be so naive, but seriously... please help me understand what Ruby is w/o Rails.
Willing to take any readings or books suggested! Sorry, I'm new to the game! Thanks!
Ruby is a language, much more closely related to Perl or Python than to a C-based language like Java. Ruby is very approachable as a language, and there's even an interactive console that you can use to quickly experiment with. Ruby itself is interpreted, so you have a lot of dynamic capabilities at your disposal. It's really a good language that you can pick up quickly.
As you say, Rails is a MVC framework that includes an ORM (ActiveRecord), a view template engine (ERB), and a variety of extensions to the standard Ruby library. Most Rails applications are websites, but you can use Rails for other purposes, such as an API-based headless server or a mobile application server - these are often combined together to make full-stack applications.
I typically recommend 2 books to programmers looking to make the switch:
Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, and Andy Hunt
Agile Web Development by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, and David Heinemeier Hansson
"Programming Ruby" covers the language constructs and use of standard tools with decent examples in the first half of the book, followed by a standard library reference in the second half. It's well written, and loved by millions as 'The Pickaxe Book'. Make sure to get the Ruby 1.9 & 2.0 book, as this covers the most recent Ruby versions and features.
"Agile Web Development" covers the introduction to Rails by developing projects and explaining the problems and decisions made along the way. I've found this to be very helpful as an introductory book for programmers looking to make the switch from another language/framework.
Here is a books list
Also Ryan Bates maintained an awesome screencats collection
Official RoR guide
I hope that helps.
I think it's important to note that Rails is not just like any other web framework in another language.
Rails is unique in that it is a "Domain Specific Language" that uses the metaprogramming features of Ruby, its host language, to modify that language substantially. There are many methods added to standard Ruby classes such as Hash and numeric classes.
Also, there are several implementations of the Ruby language, the two best ones being "MRI" Ruby (1) and JRuby (2).
(1) MRI = Matz Ruby Implementation; Matz is the nickname for Yukihiro Matsumoto, the primary author of the Ruby language. This implementation uses C language for low level operations and is sometimes called "C Ruby".
(2) JRuby - Ruby implemented in Java and running on the Java Virtual Machine, enabling interacting with code in Java and other JVM languages, and enabling use of all available CPU's for threads, unlike MRI Ruby which is limited to 1.
Along with the resources listed above, here is another tutorial/book that is free which is a staple in learning Ruby on Rails: https://www.railstutorial.org/book
It starts with many beginner concepts to more advanced concepts. It's super easy to understand.
It also teaches using Test Driven Development, which a lot of rails developers advocate; another perk to trying this book.
I remember, I have a GoF book back in college about design patterns which helped me a lot with my C and C++ programming, since my jump ship to Rails I was trying to use those design patterns I learned previously, Rails is a relatively new paradigm to me, plurals, verbs, REST, DRY.. Can you give me a recommended book for Rails that I can easily understand what I previously learned back in College.
P.S. I suspect Matz knew about the GoF book, and applied it on Ruby... :-)
Topics such as REST, DRY etc are not really in the same category as the patterns covered by the Gang of Four. There is a book, Design Patterns in Ruby which you might find useful as it covers how the original GoF patterns apply in Ruby. However, once you start programming in dynamic languages like Ruby you often find you don't need patterns in same the same way as you did in languages like C++ and Java.
I would also take a look at The Ruby Way (for general Ruby programming), Agile Web Development with Rails (for a good introduction to Rails) and The Pragmatic Programmer (which covers many of the general practices such as Don't Repeat Yourself.)
You shouldn't start learning framework without learning the language first. But if you feel confident you can check out "Agile Development With Ruby On Rails". Pragmatic bookshelf (my favorite) has some neat books on RoR development too.
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Ruby is becoming popular, largely from the influence Ruby on Rails, but it feels like it is currently struggling through its adolescence. There are a lot of similarities between Ruby and Smalltalk -- maglev is a testament to that. Despite having a more unusual syntax, Smalltalk has all (if not more) of the object-oriented beauty of Ruby.
From what I have read, Smalltalk seems to have Ruby beat on:
Maturity (developed in the 1970's)
Stability
Commercial support
Distributed source control (understands structure of code, not just text diffing)
Several implementations of the VM
Cross-platform support
The seaside web framework as a strong alternative to Rails
It seems like Ruby is just reinventing the wheel. So, why don't Ruby developers use SmallTalk? What does Ruby have the Smalltalk doesn't?
For the record: I'm a Ruby guy with little to no experience in Smalltalk, but I'm starting to wonder why.
Edit: I think the ease-of-scripting issue has been addressed by GNU Smalltalk. As I understand it, this allows you to write smalltalk in regular old text files, and you no longer need to be in the Smalltalk IDE. You can then run your scripts with:
gst smalltalk_file
I'm more of a Pythonista than a Ruby user, however the same things hold for Ruby for much the same reasons.
The architecture of Smalltalk is somewhat insular whereas Python and Ruby were built from the ground up to facilitate integration. Smalltalk never really gained a body of hybrid application support in the way that Python and Ruby have, so the concept of 'smalltalk as embedded scripting language' never caught on.As an aside, Java was not the easiest thing to interface with other code bases (JNI is fairly clumsy), but that did not stop it from gaining mindshare. IMO the interfacing argument is significant - ease of embedding hasn't hurt Python - but this argument only holds moderate weight as not all applications require this capability. Also, later versions of Smalltalk did substantially address the insularity.
The class library of most of the main smalltalk implementations (VisualWorks, VisualAge etc.) was large and had reputation for a fairly steep learning curve. Most key functionality in Smalltalk is hidden away somewhere in the class library, even basic stuff like streams and collections. The language paradigm is also something of a culture shock for someone not familiar with it, and the piecemeal view of the program presented by the browser is quite different to what most people were used to.The overall effect is that Smalltalk got a (somewhat deserved) reputation for being difficult to learn; it takes quite a bit of time and effort to become a really proficient Smalltalk programmer. Ruby and Python are much easier to learn and to bring new programmers up to speed with.
Historically, mainstream Smalltalk implementations were quite expensive and needed exotic hardware to run, as can be seen this net.lang.st80 posting from 1983. Windows 3.1, NT and '95 and OS/2 were the first mass market operating systems on mainstream hardware capable of supporting a Smalltalk implementation with decent native system integration. Previously, Mac or workstation hardware were the cheapest platforms capable of running Smalltalk effectively. Some implementations (particularly Digitalk) supported PC operating systems quite well and did succeed in gaining some traction.However, OS/2 was never that successful and Windows did not achieve mainstream acceptance until the mid 1990s. Unfortunately this coincided with the rise of the Web as a platform and a large marketing push behind Java. Java grabbed most of the mindshare in the latter part of the 1990s, rendering Smalltalk a bit of an also-ran.
Ruby and Python work in a more conventional toolchain and are not tightly coupled to a specific development environment. While the Smalltalk IDEs I have used are nice enough I use PythonWin for Python development largely because it has a nice editor with syntax highlighting and doesn't get underfoot.However, Smalltalk is was designed to be used with an IDE (in fact, Smalltalk was the original graphical IDE) and still has some nice features not replicated by other systems. Testing code with highlight and 'Show it' is still a very nice feature that I have never seen in a Python IDE, although I can't speak for Ruby.
Smalltalk was somewhat late coming to the web application party. Early efforts such as VisualWave were never terribly successful and it was not until Seaside came out that a decent web framework got acceptance in Smalltalk circles. In the meantime Java EE has had a complete acceptance lifecycle starting with raving fanboys promoting it and finally getting bored and moving onto Ruby ;-}Ironically, Seaside is starting to get a bit of mindshare among the cognoscenti so we may find that Smalltalk rides that cycle back into popularity.
Having said that, Smalltalk is a very nice system once you've worked out how to drive it.
When I leave my house in the morning to go to work, I often struggle with the decision to make a left or right turn out of my drive way (I live in the middle of a street). Either way will get me to my destination. One way leads me to the highway which, depending on traffic, will probably get me to the office the quickest. I get to drive very fast for at least part of the way and I have a good chance of seeing a pretty girl or two on their way to work :-)
The other way allows me to travel down a very enchanting, windy back road with complete tree cover. That path is quite enjoyable and of the two approaches is definitely the more fun, though it means that I will get to the office later than I would have had I taken the highway. Each way has its merits. On days that I am in a big hurry, I will usually take the highway though I may run into traffic and I also increase my chances of getting into an accident (if I am not careful in my haste). Other days I may choose the woody path and be driving along, enjoying the scenery and realize that I am running late. I may try to speed up, raising my chances of getting a ticket or causing an accident myself.
Neither way is better than the other. They each have their benefits and risks, and each will get me to my goal.
I think your question is somewhat missing the point.
You shouldn't choose, you should learn them both!
If you truly are in a position that you can choose the next framework(vm, infrastructure) then you need to decided what to use and can ask a specific question with pros and cons from the perspective of what your application is inteded to do.
I have used smalltalk (love it) and ruby (love it).
At home or for open source project I can use every language I like, but when doing work I have to adopt.
I started to use ruby (at work) because we needed some scripting language that behaved more-or-less equally under solaris,linux and windows(98,2000,xp). Ruby was at that time unknown to average-joe and there didn't exist any rails. But it was easy to sell to everyone involved.
(Why not python? the truth ? I once spend a week hunting for a bug that happened when a terminal converted my space to a tab and the intending got messed up).
So people started to code more and more in ruby because it was so relaxing, enjoying and not a cloud on the sky.
Paul Graham sums it up
It's true, certainly, that most people don't choose programming languages simply based on their merits. Most programmers are told what language to use by someone else.
and
To be attractive to hackers, a
language must be good for writing the
kinds of programs they want to write.
And that means, perhaps surprisingly,
that it has to be good for writing
throwaway programs.
And when were at the Lisp land try to replace LISP with smalltalk
Ruby’s libraries, community, and momentum are good
So if LISP is still more powerful than
Ruby, why not use LISP? The typical
objections to programming in LISP are:
There aren’t enough libraries.
We can’t hire LISP programmers.
LISP has gone nowhere in the past 20 years.
These aren’t overwhelming objections,
but they’re certainly worth
considering.
and
Now, given a choice between a powerful
language, and popular language, it may
make excellent sense to pick the
powerful one. But if the difference in
power is minor, being popular has all
sorts of nice advantages. In 2005, I’d
think long and hard before choosing
LISP over Ruby. I’d probably only do
it if I needed optimized code, or
macros which acted as full-fledged
compilers.
I would say the opposite: Smalltalk syntax is one of the simplest and powerful programming language syntaxes.
It's true the languages are very much alike. The shallow way to interpret that is to call Ruby a Smalltalk cover band. The more reasonable interpretation is that Smalltalk's closed system isolated it, while Ruby's participation in the Unix ecology and habit of appropriating features from every language under the sun gives it an infinitely gentler adoption curve and effortless integration with kickass tools like Git.
Giles Bowkett
Guess who said this? (quote is close, maybe not exact): "I always thought Smalltalk would beat Java. I just didn't know if would be called 'Ruby' when it did so."
Drum roll ....
...
The answer is ... Kent Beck
Stephane Ducasse has some great Smalltalk books available here:
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
so although the Smalltalk community is not as prolific as the Ruby and Rails communities, there is still some great help out there.
what does Ruby have that Smalltalk doesn't?
Massive, current support by major platforms (IronRuby and jRuby) that enrich the set of libraries
Evangelists like Dave Thomas who, for years, have been touring around the country preaching the gospel of their language. I have seen Dave at Java conferences stating he doesn't know Java and that he prefers Ruby.
Strong, current real estate on the bookshelves
The creator of Ruby has said that he thinks about the programmer: Ruby's syntax seems to have this Zen appeal. It is hard to pin down, yet seems to galvanize the fans.
Creative, dynamic presentations like Giles and this one that gain mindshare
I think your point is well-taken. As a friend once put it, Ruby might be "old wine in a new bottle" vis-a-vis Smalltalk. But sometimes the new bottle matters. A wine has to be in the right place at the right time.
Beats me. I spent a year checking out Ruby and doing some smallish projects to see how I liked it. I guess I'm a Smalltalk bigot because every time I'd sit down to work with Ruby I'd sigh and think "I'd really rather be doing this in Smalltalk". Finally I gave in and went back to Smalltalk. Now I'm happier. Happier is gooder.
Which of course begs the question, "Why?". In no particular order:
Because the IDE blows away anything else I've ever worked with. This includes a bunch of platforms from ISPF on IBM mainframes to Microsoft's Visual (.*), include things such as Visual Basic 4-6, Visual C++ (various incarnations), Borland's Turbo Pascal and descendants (e.g. Delphi), and stuff on DEC machines in both character mode and under X-Windows.
Because the image is a beautiful place to live. I can find what I want in there. If I can't figure out how to do something I know that somewhere in the image is an example of what I'm trying to do - all I have to do is hunt until I find it. And it's self-documenting - if you want to see the details of how something works you just open a browser on the class you're interested in, look at the method, and that's how it works. (OK, eventually you'll hit something that calls a primitive, and then it's "here there be dragons", but it's usually understandable from context). It's possible to do similar things in Ruby/C++/C, but it's not as easy. Easy is better.
The language is minimal and consistent. Three kinds of messages - unary, binary, and keyword. That describes the priority of execution, too - unary messages first, then binary messages, then keyword messages. Use parentheses to help things out. Dang little syntax, really - it's all done with message sends. (OK, assignment isn't a message send, it's an operator. So's the 'return' operator (^). Blocks are enclosed by square brace pairs ([ ] ). Might be one or two other 'magic' bits in there, but darn little...).
Blocks. Yeah, I know, they're there in Ruby (and others), but dang it, you literally can't program in Smalltalk without using them. You're forced to learn how to use them. Sometimes being forced is good.
Object-oriented programming without compromise - or alternatives, for that matter. You can't pretend that you're "doing objects" while still doing the same old thing.
Because it will stretch your brain. The comfortable constructs we've all gotten used to (if-then-else, do-while, for( ; ; ), etc) are no longer there so you have to Learn Something New. There are equivalents to all the above (and more), but you're going to have to learn to think differently. Differently is good.
On the other hand this may just be the ramblings of a guy who's been programming since the days when mainframes ruled the earth, we had to walk five miles to work through blinding snowstorms, uphill both ways, and computers used donuts for memory. I've got nothing against Ruby/Java/C/C++/, they're all useful in context, but give me Smalltalk or give me...well, maybe I should learn Lisp or Scheme or... :-)
Smalltalk:
people forwards ifTrue: [think] ifFalse: [not thinking]
Ruby:
people think forwards unless thinking backwards
1) Smalltalk's RPN-like control flow by messages is like Lisp - it's regular and cool but weirds people out.
2) Ruby lets people write code using the idiomatic way people speak - do blah unless there's a reason not to.
update rewrote the Smalltalk sample to actually be more legal code..
Ruby is the current buzz language. It's easier to market software built with it right now than a language developed in the 70s.
Community! Ruby and especially Rails has such a great community. When messing around with smalltalk it seemed that there were not as many screen casts, articles, blog posts, etc. written about Smalltalk.
You answered the question in your first line: "Ruby is becoming popular"
There are a lot of interesting modules, projects and such based around Ruby.
If you have trouble doing something in Ruby, it will be trivial to find help somewhere.
Ruby is installed on a lot of computers now (It's included by default on OS X, many Linux distros, and there are good installers for Windows) - I've not seen smalltalk installed by default on any machine I've used..
I would say wether or not one language is superior to another is irrelevant.. As an example, PHP may not be the "best" language ever, but I would still consider using it over Ruby on Rails (a "better" tool for creating websites) because it is so widespread.
Basically, specific pros and cons of a language are far less important than everything surrounding it - namely the community.
Ruby (or any other language) is more popular than Smalltalk (or any other language) because we live in a chaotic universe. To wit:
From Dave Thomas himself, "[after
the] video on 'How to Build a Blog in
Ten Minutes'... Ruby went from being
a nice little niche language, to
being 'a language you wrote Rails
apps in'" (Ruby Conference 2010
keynote).
Early Smalltalk vendors charged prohibitively
Smalltalk, because it was invented (ahead of its time) 30 years ago, occurs to many as an old, "dead" language (like FORTRAN)
corporations consider Smalltalk such a competitive advantage that they hide its use
While the languages are similar in OO features, Smalltalk's killer advantage is the live, open environment (the much-misunderstood 'image'). After you check out this example of programming in Smalltalk, the debate is over.
For me its not so much a case of what Ruby has, but what Ruby hasn't. And the thing that it doesn't have is the need for a VM and complete environment.
Smalltalk is great - its where I learnt OO concepts, but for ease of use I go for Ruby. I can write Ruby code in my favourite editor and run it form the command line.
So, for me, thats what I choose Ruby over Smalltalk.
I think everyone who has been working with Ruby for a while recognizes its deep debt to Smalltalk. As one of these people, what do I like about Ruby over Smalltalk? I think from a strictly language perspective, it's the sugar. Ruby is deliberately a very syntax-sugary language, whereas Smalltalk is a very syntax-minimal language. Ruby is essentially the Smalltalk object model with Perlish syntax sugar. I happen to like the sugar and find it makes programming more fun.
You can find a job pretty easily doing Ruby. Although I really love Smalltalk, it's virtually impossible to get into the Smalltalk niche. There is work around in it, but if you didn't get in when it was popular it's virtually impossible now.
All the other reasons pale into insignificance because you need to spend plenty of time, focused on real work to learn a language properly. If you're not independently wealthy, the best way to do that is exposure to it at work.
Because Smalltalk distributions were priced in multiples of $1000USD whereas Ruby is free.
Ruby is to Smalltalk as Arabic numerals are to Roman numerals. Same math, easier syntax.
I've done a little Smalltalk - the IDE is one thing I remember - does Ruby have good IDE support?
Use Ruby because it has might have business legs, Smalltalk doesn't.
I can tell you from personal experience. Still using Smalltalk, love it, and have used a couple flavors. Although Smalltalk is a great language, and is everything you mentioned, you wont likely convince the average CIO/CTO to use Smalltalk on a new project. Of course, you might even have a hard time convincing a conservative CIO/CTO to use Ruby. In the end you have to be very careful if you want sustained long term commercial support and the ability to find off-the-street employees that can support your systems in the future. As an example, Smalltalk was a really big thing in the early 90's and IBM invested heavily into it in the late 90's. For IBM Smalltalk was going to be the next language for all business applications. IBM put Smalltalk on everything including their mainframe systems. Java became popular, took over the market, and Smalltalk became a niche player. Over a year ago IBM dumped the language (their term is sunset). Also, take a look at the History. ParkPlace and Digitalk where the first major commercial players in the Smalltalk arena, they merged and then went out of business.
I love both Smalltalk and Ruby - but have found that Ruby is more applicable to what I do daily, and is closer to my heart (practically speaking). What does Ruby offer that Smalltalk doesn't?
Text-based scripting
Low implementation requirements (runs in more places)
Easier to learn and justify (Perl and Python programmers will have no trouble
Easier to move programs around - text files!
Interfaces well with native environment
Anywhere Java runs, jRuby runs...
Bigger and much more active community
Some have mentioned gst (GNU Smalltalk); the problems still hold.
Use whatever makes you more powerful and faster to beat your challenge.
For us, a little in house framework, we built in top of seaside is really our superpower.
I love the RoR community, it has the right attitude. That's very very valuable. But at the same time, technologically, seaside makes you stronger against more complicated problems.
You can do great seaside web apps using open-source stuff.
dabbledb was a sartup based on seaside and, hey! Avi sold it to twitter in june this year!
I say you don't need to wait for others to approve your initiative.
Just go for it. Make it done. Show us that works.
You're not alone. We are on the same boat.
Interesting perspective from Robert Martin (from RailsConf 2009): "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby, Too"
I think part of the problem is the development-environment-is-the-runtime. This gives a lot of power, but it also presents a larger learning curve.
Here is a hello world tutorial.
This is very different from other languages where I just need to know how to open a text editor and copy and paste text, hit save, and run a compiler. I HAVE to know how to use the environment. That tutorial doesn't even show me how to create a basic program (which is likely more a fault of that tutorial) that I can run.
There is definately a higher cost of just getting things going than most other languages.
Most languages have some nice eye-catching code that they can show off. I haven't seen that with Smalltalk. I also think that there is some stigma to Smalltalk because it has been around so long and it is still relatively obscure.
I think the BIGGEST difference is that Ruby is much more similar to perl in terms of USEAGE. Smalltalk never got a foothold into the "scripting" languages.
The VM is really cool and I hope ruby will have something similar to it so we can treat everything on our OS that is written in ruby as object in memory space, however until then I simply enjoy Ruby's terse, short syntax, the ability to just write a tiny script and reuse it later. Ruby got all the advantages of perl and the OOP is much more similar to smalltalk than perl's OOP hack.
I would go further than Jonke's answer, and say there are now a large number of languages that have a very strong community, almost enough to suit every taste, and a subset of these have mainstream recognition (i.e. your manager will let you use them at work as well).
It's easy to learn the basics of a language, but to actually use it effectively you need to invest enough time to learn the platform and the tools, as well as the syntax and the idioms. IIRC, McConnell claims that it takes about three years to become truly proficient.
Given those things, it's hard to justify spending a lot of time on languages like LISP and Smalltalk, although they are interesting and perhaps educational to look at.
As a latecomer to discussion, the main problem with Smalltalk and Lisp is that you can't run them with CGI or FastCGI on shared hosting.
The unwashed masses are never going to use them if they need VPS or dedicated servers to use them. IMHO Seaside is superior to almost anything out ther, but will it run on Dreamhost or Webfaction?
I'm a PHP developer who knows a little bit of Ruby. I want to learn Ruby on Rails, but most of the resources I've come across treat RoR functionality as "magic" -- i.e., it has a certain internal consistency, but don't bother asking how it works in terms of Ruby, MySQL, etc.
Anyway, I want a deep understanding of how RoR works, the design decisions that went into building it, etc. In particular I'm interested in ActiveRecord, but really I'm looking for the whole package.
Any books / sites / advice welcome.
The books "Agile Web Development with Rails" and "The Rails Way" are both pretty good. "Pro Active Record" goes really in depth for Active Record, but doesn't touch on too much else. The podcast Railscasts sometimes just uses the magic, but sometimes it explains what is really going on. Various blogs such as Art of Mission can get into what your looking for.
Additionally, using the ruby-debug gem gives you a much better understanding of what is going on - you can step into what is running behind the scenes.
There are two areas here that can be examined separately:
General concepts (which include design patterns, general attitude principles like DRY and CoC or even agility etc.) since they are the principles behind many design decisions in Rails. Any of these concepts can be studied independently of Rails (since they are general programming concepts). It's good to have at least some understanding of these before digging any deeper. There are many sources about such general principles all over the net (aforementioned Martin Fowler's site is one of the better sources for grasping such concepts).
The way Rails implements these concepts into its corpus. There are, again, two things to have in mind here. Since Rails heavily exploits features of its mother language, it's crucial to understand Ruby's peculiarities (such as mixins and plenty of Ruby's dynamic features). The last thing to understand is how Rails uses these features, ie. how it's broken down into classes and modules, how many of its features are dynamically created on the run and so on. For this purpose, I highly recommend book Ruby for Rails from David A. Black (which is exactly about Ruby, its peculiarities and the way Rails uses them). While this book might be a bit out of date, I think it's still invaluable in its content.
If you really want to know how it works, you can just look at the source code. The online API docs let you see the source code of every method right in the documentation page.
ActiveRecord in Rails is based on Martin Fowler's Active Record pattern. It's basically an ORM (object-relational mapper). It's not even really that sophisticated as far as ORMs go. Java Persistence with Hibernate has a good overview of common ORM concepts.
This one might fit here well too -> http://railsforphp.com/
This is sort of a tangential answer to your question, but I, too, came from PHP development over to Ruby/Rails dev, and it was a big transition for me. As PHP devs, we're used to getting into the nitty-gritty, to to speak, and not being prevented from looking under the hood.
By design, Rails is a black box. You're supposed to learn Rails, almost as a language itself. It's a new way of thinking of web dev, especially from a PHP dev's perspective, though this idea is not uncommon to programming in general.
Not bothering to look under the hood may be the best way to start doing things "the Rails way."
Jamis Buck has a nice series of "Under the Hood" articles on his blog that cover some aspects of Rails' internals.
The "magic" in Rails involves method_missing and the concept of metaprogramming. Dave Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmers created a set of screencasts on metaprogramming Ruby.
PHP has a somewhat-equivalent function called __call, and PHP 5.3 introduced __callstatic. You might take a look at those, as well as search Google for "php metaprogramming", for some reading material on implementing Rails-like behavior in PHP.
I found this site a good starting reference:
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby-on-rails-2.1/index.htm
It assumes MySQL in its examples.
I am sure you can find heaps and heaps by just googling for "ruby on rails tutorials", though.
ruby metaprogramming magic in rails: look at books by Rappin "Professional Rails" and Ediger "Advanced Rails", in addition to Black "Ruby for Rails" mentioned above
Naming conventions are important:
http://rails.wincent.com/wiki/Rails_conventions
http://www.softiesonrails.com/2007/10/18/ruby-101-naming-conventions
If you really want to understand Rails, read the source for the bit of Rails that you want.
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ on OSX or freeze rails and have access to it in your RAILS_ROOT/vendor/ directory
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As it stands now, I'm a Java and C# developer. The more and more I look at Ruby on Rails, the more I really want to learn it.
What have you found to be the best route to learn RoR? Would it be easier to develop on Windows, or should I just run a virtual machine with Linux?
Is there an IDE that can match the robustness of Visual Studio? Any programs to develop that give a good overhead of what to do? Any good books?
Seriously, any tips/tricks/rants would be awesome.
I've been moving from C# in my professional career to looking at Ruby and RoR in my personal life, and I've found linux to be slightly more appealing personally for development. Particularly now that I've started using git, the implementation is cleaner on linux.
Currently I'm dual booting and getting closer to running Ubuntu full time. I'm using gedit with various plugins for the development environment. And as of late 2010, I'm making the push to use Vim for development, even over Textmate on OS X.
A large amount of the Rails developers are using (gasp) Macs, which has actually got me thinking in that direction.
Although I haven't tried it, Ruby in Steel gives you a Ruby IDE inside the Visual Studio world, and IronRuby is the .NET flavor of Ruby, if you're interested.
As far as books are concerned, the Programming Ruby (also known as the Pickaxe) book from the Pragmatic Programmers is the de-facto for learning Ruby. I bit the bullet and purchased that book and Agile Web Development with Rails; both books have been excellent.
Peepcode screencasts and PDF books have also been great for getting started; at $9 per screencast it's hard to go wrong. I actually bought a 5-pack.
Also check out the following:
Official Rails Guides
Railscasts
railsapi.com or Ruby on Rails - APIdock
The Ruby Show
Rails for Zombies
Softies on Rails - Ruby on Rails for .NET Developers
Rails Podcast
Rails Best Practices
I've burned through the backlog of Rails and Rails Envy podcasts in the past month and they have provided wonderful insight into lots of topics, even regarding software development in general.
Beware, the rails world is a massively frustrating mess of outdated and inconsistent documentation and examples. It is maybe one of the fastest moving and most faddish development communities there is. By the time you learn something it will already have changed. Even the books are not consistent in which version of rails they are talking about. Documentation by blogging! enough said.
I currently do RoR on windows. My advice is to avoid windows if you can. Lots of things don't work and the rails community really really doesn't care about you. The move to Git has really messed me up since it doesn't work very well on windows. A lot of gems will fail because of this (Heroku looks like a cool tool - too bad for me it can't handle window's Git setup). Capistrano is out. It goes on and annoyingly on.
Plus, in the back of your mind, you always wonder when something doesn't work "Is it a rails/windows problem?" I am not sure this is solved by using linux because linux brings its own hassles like constantly having to upgrade all those different dependencies, etc...If that's the kind of thing you enjoy it might be an okay choice for you. Those days of enjoying system fiddling are behind me and I just want to get on with doing my work. I am planning on installing ubuntu on a home machine just so i can get familiar with things like capistrano so maybe my opinion will change.
I'd highly suggest if you are going to do rails dev for any amount of time you seriously consider getting a Mac. If you value your time and sanity it will pay for itself almost instantly. Depending on how you value your time 10 hours of debugging windows/linux setup problems and you have spend as much as a Mac costs anyway.
Rails is a joy compared to what it replaces but it is a bit of a pain in that its proponents skip right past a lot of the boring but important stuff like documentation, compatibility issues and community building. It is way more powerful than other frameworks like Django but I sometimes look over at the Django documentation and community and sigh like a guy with a wild sexy girlfriend looking at his friend's plain but sane and stable wife. But then rails adds a feature and I go "Ohhh shiny!"
IMO the Rails Screencasts are better than the Peepcode screencasts. RubyPlus also has screencasts, mind you, they are bit rough around the edges. BuildingWebApps has a free online course that starts doing screencasts halfway through.
Path of least resistance:
Have a simple web project in mind.
Go to rubyonrails.org and look at their "Blog in 15 minutes" screencast to get excited.
Get a copy of O'Reilly Media's Learning Ruby
Get a Mac or Linux box.
(Fewer early Rails frustrations due to the fact that Rails is generally developed on these.)
Get a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails.
Get the version of Ruby and Rails described in that book.
Run through that book's first section to get a feel for what it's like.
Go to railscasts.com and view at the earliest videos for a closer look.
Buy The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez to get a deeper understanding of Rails and what it's doing.
Then upgrade to the newest production version of Rails, and view the latest railscasts.com videos.
I wrote a post called "Getting Started With Rails -- What I wish I knew" that many people found helpful.
The basics:
Agile development with Rails (book)
InstantRails for quick ruby/rails environment on Windows
Aptana as the IDE
Subversion for version control
The online tutorials are decent but scattered. Invest $30 in a book for a more comprehensive understanding.
I've found http://railstutorial.org/book to be a great resource for learning Rails
I really enjoy RubyMine from Jetbrains. It seems like a very full featured IDE something I miss from many of the other alternatives out there. Also for a simple env I enjoy e the text editor. Plain and simple.
IDE: NetBeans
Book: Agile Web Development With Rails
Installation: Instant Rails
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Ruby
Bruno R. Preiss |
Published in 2004
Learn to Program
Chris Pine | Pragmatic Bookshelf
Published in 2006, 176 pages
Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book
Jeremy McAnally |
Published in 2006, 147 pages
Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide
David Thomas, Andrew Hunt | Addison-Wesley
Published in 2000, 608 pages
Rails in a Nutshell
C. Fauser, J. MacAulay, E. Ocampo-Gooding, J. Guenin | O'Reilly Media
Published in 2009, 352 pages
Ruby Best Practices
Gregory T. Brown | O'Reilly Media
Published in 2009, 328 pages
Ruby Essentials
| Techotopia
Published in 2007
Ruby on Rails Security
Heiko Webers | OWASP
Published in 2009, 48 pages
Ruby User's Guide
Mark Slagell |
Published in 2005
The Book Of Ruby
Huw Collingbourne |
Published in 2009, 425 pages
The Little Book of Ruby
Huw Collingbourne | Dark Neon Ltd.
Published in 2008, 87 pages
why's (poignant) guide to Ruby
why the lucky stiff |
Published in 2008
There's a very solid ongoing series on NETTUTS right now that you may be interested in.
http://railsforzombies.org/ is a nice one. Introducing an all new way to learn Ruby on Rails in the browser with no additional configuration needed.
As you, I'm a java/C# developer trying to learn more Ruby On Rails.
I'm taking the free online course Ruby on Rails Programming with Passion, is a good introductory course, check it out.
We are using NetBeans as IDE (win/mac/linux/solaris), if you are used to Eclipse or Visual Studio, there is a good chance you will like it.
Fantastic decision! It is extremely useful to get a grounding in Ruby before going to Rails so here is my take on the best path to Rails:
Learn to Program by Chris Pine - You can read this in an afternoon to get a feel for the Ruby language.
The Well Grounded Rubyist by David Black - Like the title says it will give you an excellent grounding in the language.
Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen - This book is sublime, it reads like a novel.
Ruby Best Practices by Gregory Brown - By this point you should be ready for the advanced level of this book.
Rails for Zombies - Fun tutorial you can complete in an afternoon.
Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl - Fantastic (and free) tutorial and I have heard his accompanying screencasts are amazing.
Agile Web Development with Rails by Sam Ruby - By the time you are finished this you are now a completely capable Rails person!
Aside from books the most important thing is to get feedback on what you are doing. To do this I recommend spending time in irc.freenode.net #ruby and #rubyonrails. It is also extremely helpful to post things you are working on or having trouble with here on stackoverflow as the comments, explanations and different way of thinking about things that people provide are invaluable.
You should also definitely check out the Ruby Rogues podcast, they provide invaluable information and the commentators are all extremely respected people in the Ruby community. And for your viewing and reading pleasure (in that order,) head over to Ryan Bates's Railscasts and then Eifion Bedford's Asciicasts.
Finally, I recommend looking into different gems on github, reading the code and then contributing to them. You don't have to get overly ambitious and do massive recodes, especially at first. Just start with small things like editing and making the README files a little easier to read.
I don't use an IDE but at Railsconf I saw a demo of Rubymine from Jetbrains and it seemed pretty amazing.
0) LEARN RUBY FIRST. This is very important. One huge advantage of Rails is Ruby: a great language that is very powerful but also marvelously easy to misunderstand. Run through a few Ruby tutorials online. When coding challenges come up on Daily WTF, write them in Ruby. You'll pick it up fast.
1) Go buy the book "Ruby for Rails"
2) Check out a Rails tutorial and subscribe to the Riding Rails blog.
3) Standup an app locally. Don't use scaffolding.
4) When you install plugins into your app, go look at the code in that plugin (in your vendor directory) and learn it. It is one of the best ways to learn Ruby and Rails internals. When you don't understand how something works, post it here and 1,000 people will help you.
As for your other questions:
Yes, you will need a Linux environment to develop in. You can develop Rails on Windows, but that doesn't mean it should be done. Lots of gems aren't up to speed on Windows.
NetBeans works well as an IDE. If you're on a Mac, you'll get street cred for using Textmate.
Find a nearby Ruby users group and start attending that. I've found that is a great way to meet a lot of people who are passionate about development and willing to teach.
I'm surprised there has been so little mention of Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. Why may not be around anymore but the guide is easy to find on the net (Google points here first) it's a very easy read and provided my introduction to Ruby.
After the guide, I'd recommend either one of the books the others have suggested, or following the series of screencasts at Learning Rails which is how I picked up enough Ruby on Rails to be dangerous. Once you've completed the Learning Rails series. what you want to do with Rails will start to diverge from the general tutorials and that's where Railscasts becomes a wonderful tool. There's not much can be done with Rails that Railscasts hasn't touched on at some point.
My first suggestion would be to learn a little about symbols first. Rails isn't the smallest framework ever, and while there's definitely lots to learn, most of it will start to make sense if you have at least a little bit of understanding what makes it different ("special") from other languages. As pointed out, there's no exact analog in any of the major languages, but they're heavily used by Rails, in order to make things read straightforwardly and perform well, which is the reason I brought it up. My very first exposure to Rails was also my first time looking at Ruby (well before 2.0), and the first thing that caught my eye was the goofy :things they were passing around, and I asked, "WTF is that?"
Also, check out RubyQuiz, and read other peoples' answers on that site.
I came from a Java background to Ruby to. I found this tutorial helpful http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/to-ruby-from-java/. When it comes to learning rails I cannot say how much I use script\console. It allows you to play with the code and learn how to do things that you are not sure about.
The only book I ever bought was Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with-rails-third-edition. It was quite useful and provided a good overview of the Rails framework. In addition to that I regular watch Railscasts(http://railscasts.com), which is a great screen casting blog that covers all kinds of Rails topics.
I personally prefer using Linux (because git works better). But, I have also used windows and besides git I do not think the OS choice will impact your programming.
I use netbeans for my IDE and occasionally vim (with the rails plugin). I like netbeans but, I find that it can still be a little flaky when it comes to the Rails support (not all the features work all the time).
This looks like a great resource for people like me who are coming from PHP to RoR
http://railsforphp.com/ There's also a book Rails for PHP Developers
I used to do Java and C# on Windoze.
I'd second these sources:
IDE: Try Apatana RadRails 3 Sneak Peek: http://www.radrails.org/3. Its the closest thing you'll get to Visual Studio. I play with it here and there but still love the lightness of Textmate.
OS: Mac OS gets the most if not all love from Ruby community. Anything else is treated like a bastard child.
Books:
The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide (the pickaxe book)
Agile Web Development with Rails
Screencasts:
Peepcode (pay) is a nice way to pick up concepts quickly
Railscasts (free) is a good weekly way to pick up new gems and concepts incrementally
Railscasts (pro) is also a good way to pick up concepts for a pretty low price.
The ubber source for anything Rails is http://www.rubyonrails.org/ if they don't have it on the site you probably don't need it.
A quick cookbook is Ruby on Rails: Up and Running you can get it from O'Rielly or search Google for a on-line version. They walk you though the conventions of Rails and use Instant Rails which is ok.
A better Rails book "Agile Web Development with Rails" This is the soups to nuts of Rails. It walks you though downloading and setting up Rails, Gems, everything.
If you want are a Java 'guy' and want a transition book O'Reilly has "Rails for Java Developers" http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780977616695/?CMP=AFC-ak_book&ATT=Rails+for+Java+Developers
Another IDE you could try is Aptana.
Oh I almost forgot. Here are a few more Ruby screencast resources:
SD Ruby - the have a bunch of videos online - I found their Rest talks SD9 and SD10 to be among the best of the intros. Other rest talks assume you know everything. These ones are very introductory and to the point.
Obie Fernandez on InfoQ - Restful Rails. I've also read his Rails Way book and found it informative but really long winded and meandering and the quality is a bit inconsistent. I learned a lot from this book but felt it was a bit punishing to have to read through the repetition and irrelevant stuff to get to the good bits.
Netbeans is a nice hand holding IDE that can teach you a lot of language tricks if you have the patience to wait for its tooltips (it is a painfully slow IDE even on a really fast machine) and you can use the IDE to graphically browse through the available generators and stuff like that. Get the latest builds and you even have Rspec test running built in.
Bort is a prebuilt base app with a lot of the standard plugins already plugged in. If you download it and play with it and figure out how it is setup you are about halfway to creating your own full featured apps.
I bought the book "Simply Rails 2" by Patrick Lenz.
This book is a great introduction to Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
As for my ruby installation and db, I used Cygwin.
It comes with PostgreSQL, ruby and svn.
I like PostgreSQL because I come from an Oracle
background so it feels more comfortable than MySQL.
The other utility I found really useful was pgAdmin
for accessing the PostgreSQL databases.
The first thing I needed to do was to get gems installed.
I got the gems tar file from rubyforge
wget "http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz"
Once I had gems setup, I installed
rails
ruby-postgres
postgres
rack
I also needed an issue tracking system so I installed redmine.
wget "http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz"
I found that using a UNIX-like environment (Cygwin) was
preferable in my case because many of the tutorials were
taylored for OS X or Linux.
The text editor I use is Textpad. I'm looking for an alternative.
I think that vim with the rails plugin might work nicely.
I come from a non-programming background. I have learned PHP on my own and recently joined a firm that specializes in Ruby on Rails. They have a comprehensive Rails training program, which is flexible enough to accommodate whatever changes we want to implement. Though I am not a rails pro, I would like to share my experience with rails. I hope that it helps.
Here is the path I am following [combined with tools I am using]
Start with a simple ruby guide. It will help a lot, since entire rails framework revolves around classes and objects.
Environment and OS are not important. Though I am working on a Mac, I frequently work on Linux and Windows, and I do not face any problems.
Start with a good book which explains using a demo app. [I am using Agile Web Development with Rails - By The Pragmatic Bookshelf]. There are many other good books as well.
Once you are done with the application, you will have a good idea of the framework.
Try to understand the SQL queries generated by Active Record module.
Go through the Rails Guides. You will find the framework a lot easier.
Keep practicing.
Few imp points
It takes years to learn a language completely. So be patient and do not stop learning.
Go through rails api as when required. [While developing your first app]
Google the things which you do not understand. People have written great articles on almost all topics.
Use Stackoverflow :-) [Only when you are not able to find the solution on your own.]
Load railscasts on your phone or video player. Watch 'em while travelling or in your free time. They are of few minutes each. You will learn a great deal of things and also learn the best way of doing things.
Tools
Shell [in Mac and Ubuntu]
Editor [Textmate in Mac, Gedit in Ubuntu and Notepad++ in Windows]
Firefox with Firebug installed for testing.
Finally I have one thing to say "Keep trying". All the best.
The fastest way to learn anything, Ruby on Rails included, is pair programming.
Find someone who knows Rails, pick an example app, sit down, and work through fixing bugs, adding features.
The knowledge sharing is unbelievable.
My suggestion is just to start - pick a small project that you would generally use to learn an MVC-style language (i.e. something with a database, maybe some basic workflow), and then as you need to learn a concept, use one (or both!) of
Agile Web Development with Rails
or
The Rails Way
to learn about how it works, and then try it.
The problems with Agile Web Development are that it's outdated, and that the scenario runs on too long for you really to want to build it once; The Rails Way can be hard to follow as it bounces from reference to learning, but when it's good, it's better than Agile Web Development.
But overall they're both good books, and they're both good for learning, but neither of them provide an "education" path that you'll want to follow. So I read a few chapters of the former (enough to get the basic concepts and learn how to bootstrap the first app - there are some online articles that help with this as well) and then just got started, and then every few days I read about something new or I use the books to understand something.
One more thing: both books are much more Rails books than they are Ruby books, and if you're going to write clean code, it's worth spending a day learning Ruby syntax as early as possible. Why's Guide to Ruby is a good one, there are others as well.
I think the screencasts and short books from Peepcode are really good. They have screencasts to get you started and have some as you get more advanced.
There is a site called Softies on Rails that is written by a couple of ex-.NET developers that may be of some use. They have a book called Rails for .NET Developers coming out in the next few months...
I started out on a Windows box using the RadRails plugin for Eclipse and the RubyWeaver extension for Dreamweaver (back during the 1.x days of Rails). Since then I have moved to a Mac running TextMate and haven't thought of going back.
As for books, I started with The Ruby Way and Agile Web Development with Rails. It definately helps to build a background in Ruby as you start to make your way into Rails development.
Definately watch the Railscast series by Ryan Bates.
I have found "The Rails Way" by Obie Fernandez excellent and often found myself referring to it when Agile Web Development with Rails didn't seem to go far enough. Obie Fernandez has a decent blog too.
Wait a couple of months for Learning Rails by Simon St. Laurent, Edd Dumbill to come out in November. That series of books is stupendous, and this book will cover the latest version of Rails.