Ruby on Rails, my new favourite plaything in the last days of ‘freedom’ before the throngs of academic life, which is grating at my very soul, consumes me again. Actually, I love learning, and I love school, I just hate my ICT Project, which I should be doing as I type this.

But anyway, the point, as I veer myself back on topic, is that yesterday, I finally took the plunge into Ruby on Rails.

The thing that always confused me about RoR is … well, the whole thing. I read a few blogs¹ that always champion Rails as an easy to use programming language, which uses less lines of code than other competing languages to achieve the same thing, and is generally ‘Beautiful’. My usual sense of wonder tells me that maybe I should have a go this, having dabbled in Javascript and being quietly competent at PHP. The thing is that, perhaps because I’m not exactly a hugely talented programmer as of yet, the main site, where I would expect to learn something, doesn’t actually tell me (pardon my language) fuck-all. And this is frustrating, because to me at least, and maybe this is just teenage anger boiling over, this creates a sort of elitist environment around the language thats means that only people that understand what all jargon means and are used to that object-orientated style of programming can actually appreciate the good points. This applies to plenty of other ‘ROR for Beginners’ tutorials which treat the ‘beginner’ as some sort of fairly high level web-programmer from the start. My frustration was building, as time after time I could never find an accessible way of getting started.

Finally, I found this just in time, which actually let me try something out, and I am forever in debt to the creator for taking the time to do that. Now I can actually understand whats going on, my frustration has subsided. And although I’ve only done a few low level things, I can see what all the fuss is about now. And in the summer, after my exams and holidays, I’m going to teach myself two (well two and a bit) languages that I’ve been meaning to get my hands on: PHP (since this is the most widely used one in the web design companies I’ve come across), AJAX (because it’s great) and now, Ruby on Rails, because, it looks like it’s the future.

Now … the next thing I want to know about all the funky syntax in Ruby is … what’s a ‘gem’? *goes off to burrow through the internets!*

1. See that! Now that method of subtle linkage is a blogging classic. I feel proud. [back]

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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