Running on Rails – Part 1
Posted on March 30, 2007 by S Running
Tech
I flipped through a few of the beginning Rails books and settled on Patrick Lenz’s “Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications.” I think it was the blue and orange cover that persuaded me to select it, but it turned out to be a good choice. It promises to teach you how to build your own Digg.com style site if you make it through the entire text. Note that Digg.com was built on Rails.
The text is a crash course in Rails, MySQL, AJAX and a little Apache. I’m not an object oriented programmer, nor a relational database guy. I think the only requirement is patience and a basic understanding of HTML. The biggest challenge so far was getting MySQL configured on my Mac, due to known issues with the OSX MySQL installer. Rails itself has been pretty painless, which is kind of the point of the whole thing.
I’m about a third of the way through and I’m really digging it. It’s certainly not making me a Rails guru, but I’ve set up a primitive web application where you can submit links, run simple searches and save it all in a little MySQL database. The most remarkable thing is how much the Rails framework takes care of. Little objects handle most of your needs, and you just string a bunch of them together to build your app (a fundamental concept to Rails is that everything is an object). Sadly, I can’t yet publish a link to my application, but I hope to do so soon.
If you are interested in getting a working primer in Rails, then don’t miss Lenz’s book. Experienced object oriented programmers might have better luck elsewhere, but they will probably have to live with a cover featuring a creepy animal illustration.
Which book would you pick?
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Hmmm. Can’t wait to test out the mystery application you’re putting together!