Re: Concept of Ruby on Rails

tonypm
Sat, 04 Aug 2007 08:23:58 -0000

Hi,

also, home in on the RubyonRails web site.

The Rubyonrails documentation page is helpful.

http://www.rubyonrails.org/docs

I tutorial (Rolling with Ruby on Rails) listed there is great.  It is
what I did first to give me an overview of what Rails was about and to
see if it would do what i wanted.

( The wiki is not the best ever (get to it via ''community''),
but there
is some good stuff there.)

The next thing I realised was that I needed to understand the
distinction between what is Rails and what is Ruby so I could make
sense of the code.  I went through the online Ruby book (pickaxe):

http://www.rubycentral.com/pickaxe/

You don''t need to understand it all on first read, but without
grasping the Ruby basics,  you will not make sense of Rails.

Also, you need to find your way around the Rails API.

http://api.rubyonrails.org/

This takes a lot of getting into.  Understand MVC from the tutorial,
then understand which modules relate to which part of the Framework,
(eg.  ActiveRecord for the Model etc).  The API is hard to get into,
it has examples, but often in an adjacent or similar method.  Getting
to understand the parameters and options takes a while.  But once you
home in on the method you want, you can nearly always google an
example.  Particularly on this group.

Finally, for me - when I was convinced I wanted to really get into
Rails (and I love it), I bought the Agile book already referenced by
chirag.  It really does cover the vast majority of what you want to
know and is well presented.  The pdf download is good value.

HTH
Tonypm