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40 points and no comments... Can we please discuss this? I would like to know if this makes Rails worth learning for someone who knows Ruby but doesn't know ra
by shrugger 10y ago
40 points and no comments... Can we please discuss this?
I would like to know if this makes Rails worth learning for someone who knows Ruby but doesn't know rails. I have found my ruby knowledge to be less than marketable, and I want to step my game up. What do yall think?
- dankohn1 10y agoI really can't recommend Hartl's Rails Tutorial highly enough. https://www.railstutorial.org/book https://www.railstutorial.org/book It not only teaches you Rails, it teaches Github and Heroku and gets your first first web app deployed at the end of the first chapter. And, it's free! There is also enormous hiring market for Rails developers.
- cutler 10y agoI'm not sure about that. Search Indeed.co.uk's API (which removes duplicates) for - "Ruby" title:(Rails or RoR) - and you'll find 101 jobs listed in London. Repeat the search for United Kingdom and there are only 158. So 64% of Rails jobs are in London. Compare that with PHP - 2102 jobs in the UK, 672 of them in London and you find a more even distribution and a much higher number of jobs. Rails is still a niche framework and has never come anywhere near matching PHP's adoption despite all the hype.
- pmontra 10y agoI almost want to say thay this is an unfair comparison but that would also be unfair. Nothing matches PHP adoption. It started 10 years before than Ruby and Python web frameworks and its runtime model is ideal for free hosting. That gave it mindshare and market share. It's still one of the ugliest languages even if it's slowly getting a face lift. At the time its competitors where Java and Perl. Perl could have the same runtime model and was the first language for the web thanks to CGI.pm. PHP won because its simplicity and the commands embedded in the HTML page. Java is another world and only suited to corporate developers especially because there could be hardly a free Java hosting. Any of them now, not counting the AWS Lambda free tier?
- enraged_camel 10y agoYeah, but what percentage of those PHP jobs involve customizing a Wordpress site? I personally wouldn't touch any of those with a ten foot pole. Besides, PHP codebases are notorious for being incredibly messy. PHP as a language used to suck big time, so you'd be taking over lots and lots of legacy code that would make you cry. That's nowhere as big of a problem with Rails: it's newer and Ruby is a joy to work with.
- zeemonkee3 10y agoHow well paid are PHP jobs compared to Rails? I know the UK has abysmal salaries for developers (especially outside London) but the average salary for a PHP developer [1] is in a class of its own, much less than Ruby [2]. [1] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=PHP_Developer/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=PHP_Developer/Salary [2] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Ruby_Software_Developer_%2f_Programmer/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Ruby_Software_Develo...
- hayksaakian 10y agoIf you're really a ruby pro then you should really check out rails. I'd say that 80% or more of the 'ruby' work out there is really 'rails' work.
- dguaraglia 10y agoI'm a big Python evangelist for reasons lost to history, but even I would recommend learning Ruby on Rails if you want to make yourself marketable. I'm not sure how much of a market there is out there right now for people with Rails experience, but it never hurts to learn something new. Besides, whether you chose to use Rails, or Sinatra, or move to some other language, as long as you are doing web development you'll be able to apply the concepts learned. So I say go for it!
- shrugger 10y agoI know a few other languages, they just aren't nearly as marketable as Ruby. I've learned Lua, Scheme, I know a little bit of Julia but most of the stdlib is over my head mathematically. I've fallen in love with Ruby because it seems to be how I 'think' about problems. I just never really had the motivation to learn Rails, I always hear people complaining about it, I've never needed a website or anything, I don't know. It just never happened.
- Cyph0n 10y agoLike the parent commenter, I'm also a huge fan of Python. I've recently started my journey learning web dev using Scala. It's a pretty hot language right now, what with the rise of big data and ML (see Spark for example). It allows you to use existing Java libraries, yet there still is a considerable number of high-quality libraries written in Scala. The stack I've chosen is Scala + Play + Slick, but there are several popular options.
- KurtMueller 10y agoYou should look at Elixir/Phoenix - I think it's the next rails and will be the new hotness in a year or so :) I'm personally a fan of Clojure which is an excellent language with excellent tooling and a smart and friendly community
- qaq 10y ago+1 You should look at Elixir/Phoenix
- jesalg 10y agoI'll bite. If you know Ruby, I'd definitely recommend taking the next step and learning Rails. I started with Plain Old Ruby first as well by writing small scripts and then slowly graduated to Sinatra and ultimately Rails. Unless you are using Ruby for DevOps you can almost never go without having to interact with Rails or it's components in some way.
- shrugger 10y agoI know a little about a lot of things, but I know least of all about web development. I worked my way through some Sinatra tutorials and through the Cuba.rb book, but I just never got into it. Are there any books that you'd recommend or anything?
- KurtMueller 10y agoMichael Hartl's tutorial! https://www.railstutorial.org/ https://www.railstutorial.org/
- fdsarewq 10y agohttp://www.amazon.com/Rails-Edition-Addison-Wesley-Professional-Ruby/dp/0321944275/ref=dp_ob_title_bk http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Edition-Addison-Wesley-Professio... ..
- jesalg 10y agoPersonally I find the most effective way to quickly pickup something is by using it in a project. I'd recommend some of these starter projects that you can download and start hacking: http://railsapps.github.io/ http://railsapps.github.io/
- shrugger 10y agoAh, good idea. Thanks so much!
- mjfisher 10y agoFor learning RoR, I can't really recommend enough Agile Web Development with Rails 4 (although you might want to wait for a revised v5 version to pop up). It takes you through building a simple site with a shopping cart from scratch, and lets you encounter enough real-world style situations to give you a really good grounding.
- danielrhodes 10y agoIf you have strong opinions on how things should be done with a web framework, I would suggest, for the sake of sanity, to purposefully learn Rails with an open mind and just let it do what it wants to do. When you learn it that way, it doesn't take long to figure out.
- velaru 10y agoRails will be useful regardless. Even when I am not working on a Rails project, I still use rails in some manner or another. Be it stubbing out a temp api for an Angular front or sculpting out a Schematic during planning. Over the years it's been an invaluable tool.
- esaym 10y agoI get plenty of contract to hire jobs for rails to my inbox from linked in. Pay rates are usually $70k+, sometimes going above 100k for sr positions (for Austin and Dallas areas). So I'd say if you like ruby, then go for it. I don't really like ruby though, or rails. Or course you should also learn some front end stuff too and be more full stack worthy, especially with ajax powered APIs.
- jtmarmon 10y agothrowing shit together is insanely fast. i mean insanely. once i had a friend who was asking me for a time estimate on building a backend for his iOS app (mostly crud with a couple search routes) and i just did it for him in thirty minutes.
- skewart 10y agoYeah that's the incredible thing about Rails. It's just so fricking fast to set up a project. I kinda feel like it's going out of fashion - being eclipsed by Node mostly -and that sucks because I've never found another framework that is as simple and quick to work with.
- netghost 10y agoIf you understand Rails, you'll have a better grasp of a lot of the other web frameworks out there that have been inspired by it. So even if you don't use it in the future, learning it may be helpful.
- knivets 10y agoRails is nice, at least in the beginning. It's easy to pick it up and build something trivial, but it's pretty hard to solve some non-trivial issues -- you have to learn the framework internals. While, "frontend" side in Rails is pretty easy to grasp, internals are much harder, in my opinion (due to a very large codebase and Ruby's flexibility). It is definitely a convenient tool, designed with programmer happiness in mind -- so there're a lot of things which will make your life easier. Although, sometimes this UX-centric model backfires and we get such things as RSpec. Finally, it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are into money-side of the question, then maybe JavaScript ecosystem might be more worthwhile. Although, I believe that it is possible to bootstrap demand around tools that you are passionate about if you convince others to think the same way. My point being, that maybe you should look at the technologies that you love instead of following the market hype, but this is more harder and also means more time investment, but it pays off in the future.
- jrumbut 10y agoThe most important lesson I've learned from Rails is that you always have to learn the framework internals. If you're doing anything non-trivial, there will always be very helpful undocumented features, a much, much easier way to do things, and you can know how to build out entirely new functionality and keep it consistent with the core system so future developers don't have to learn every detail of your solution.
- AnneOminous 10y agoRSpec is not a "backfire" of Rails. It's a generalized Ruby TDD tool which has very little to do with Rails per se. The suggestion that RSpec was created to cover some failure of Rails strikes me as exceedingly strange.