Learning to Code: Lessons from building a simple Rails app with Treehouse

Re:Learning to Code: Lessons from building a simple Rails ap... by jasonshen on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @03:55PM (#5173173)

Hey doktrin - thanks for sharing your perspective! I did see that notice on Devise's documentation. I think Hartl's Rails Tutorial will go through a more basic user auth process.

If you think Rails is a poor first choice - what's your recommended language and why?

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Re:Learning to Code: Lessons from building a simple Rails ap... by doktrin on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @04:15PM (#5173265)

>If you think Rails is a poor first choice - what's your recommended language and why?

At the risk of being a little pedantic, I think Ruby is a great choice (Rails being a web framework). Sinatra is much more lightweight Ruby framework that I personally think is more appropriate when starting out. It offers far fewer abstractions (or, "magic") and is a radically simpler beast. To put some numbers on that assertion, the codebase itself is less than 1/100th the size of Rails.

If working with a different language, I recommend starting with some similar level of abstraction. Sinatra-esque frameworks typically offer enough functionality to make development fun while not obfuscating too much of the logic. Spark (Java) is Sinatra inspired. While I've never seriously developed in Python, web.py has been on my to-use list for quite some time.

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Re:Learning to Code: Lessons from building a simple Rails ap... by jasonshen on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @04:31PM (#5173345)

No worries - you're right, I should have said framework. Will look into Sinatra!

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Re:Learning to Code: Lessons from building a simple Rails ap... by scottmagdalein on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @11:00PM (#5174808)

Hey Jason, I'm a learner just like you and have only been working with Ruby for about 8 months. I'm a Treehouse customer and mix those video courses with Codecademy for reinforcement.

I started trying to learn Rails at the same time that I was learning Ruby. That was a bad choice and I gave up after a couple months. When I started back at it recently, I dove straight into Ruby alone and left the frameworks out of it. After I felt comfortable enough in Ruby, I added Sinatra and love it.

Rails is powerful, but Sinatra is "just enough" for beginners like us.

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Re:Learning to Code: Lessons from building a simple Rails ap... by bdcravens on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @06:09PM (#5173920)

Learn something that requires you to write all the code as your first language (like PHP without a framework), and then Rails as your second "language". Only after writing SQL do you truly realize the power of Active Record, or write session-based authentication do you appreciate Devise. I love Rails's "magic", but I like that I can visualize what a Gem is doing based on how similar functionality would be implemented in PHP or ColdFusion.

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