14 ms·

Ruby on Rails in a week

497 points by Tenhundfeld 6y ago

pqdbr 6y ago
Having picked up Rails 9 years ago and having been using it literally daily ever since, it's joyful to read from someone that is just starting. I also started with https://www.railstutorial.org/book https://www.railstutorial.org/book, highly recommend it. I also loved Metaprogramming Ruby (Paolo Perrotta) - it's more advanced and starts to open your mind to how Rails magic DSL's were built. I just bought today "Rebuilding Rails" (https://rebuilding-rails.com/ https://rebuilding-rails.com/), heard great things about it. Ruby and Rails are amazing, and I wouldn't trade it for any other language/framework out there.
- weaksauce 6y ago
  the other book that is great for ruby is eloquent ruby. one of the best programming books I've read and one of the few that I've read cover to cover instead of piecemeal.
- WJW 6y ago
  The Rails tutorial is of exceptional quality. I wish more software had explanations that clear.
- raesene9 6y ago
  Those are great resources. One I'd add to it, for general ruby programming, is the Well Grounded Rubyist (https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-rubyist-third-edition https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-rubyist-thir...) . It's been kept up to date (3rd edition was released in 2019) and I found it very readable and informative.
  - ashconnor 6y ago
    Great book. I own the second edition.
  - Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
    Also I will add Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby, by Sandi Metz (https://www.poodr.com/ https://www.poodr.com/). It was a great help to me when I was first beginning to self teach programming years ago. A lot of it applies no matter the language; I haven't written Ruby in probably 4 years but the principles in that book guide my programming to this day.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmcgough 6y ago
    That was one of the books I picked up early in my career and still keep a well-loved, dog-eared copy. It's information-dense without being overwhelming, and teaches a lot of important Ruby concepts. I'm glad to see it's being kept up to date.
  - sciurus 6y ago
    Agreed, this is a great book. In the past I used to read and write a lot of Ruby. An earlier edition of the book was the single resource that taught me the most. The only programming language book I've enjoyed and benefited from as much since then is Fluent Python.
  - jandinter 6y ago
    Highly recommended! I started with the Rails Tutorial as well and read The Well-Grounded Rubyist afterwards to get more in-depth with Ruby. After that, I bought Bob Race‘s tutorial Build a Saas App with Rails which covers more practical aspects of building a multi-user SaaS app using well-known gems (instead of building everything by myself as in the Rails tutorial): https://leanpub.com/basair6 https://leanpub.com/basair6
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tedkimble 6y ago
  Love the Rebuilding Rails concept! I'm doing a very similar thing in Ruby, focused more on "web application development from first principles" (https://theodorekimble.ck.page/e0bb43b156 https://theodorekimble.ck.page/e0bb43b156). I know I better absorb concepts if I can trace them back to a more fundamental "truth". Curious to hear if anyone else has found success with Rebuilding Rails, and what they found most helpful.
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
    If you want to do the same thing (build up from 1st principles) with CSS, I ravingly endorse Axiomatic CSS as defined and implemented in https://every-layout.dev https://every-layout.dev Disclaimers: no affiliation, just a very satisfied customer. IME the free content alone is illuminating, and having paid $100 to access to the full "book" incl all the layouts' implementation it was a bargain.
    - Arkdy 6y ago
      Starting my projects from every-layout instead of using foundation/bootstrap has been like the move away from jQuery as js developed.
- andruby 6y ago
  I learned RoR from the wonderful Agile Web Development with Rails (2nd edition). David Black’s “Ruby for Rails” and a little later “Eloquent Ruby” helped me to better grasp the difference between Ruby the language and Rails the framework. I was a kid, and read the first two books 14 years ago. One on a holiday in Kenya and the other in Egypt. No distractions, just travel, family and reading. These days it seems like a lot of junior developers want to learn it more interactively. I hope books stay popular. In my opinion, they do a great job at explaining the why & the reasoning, instead of just showing you how.
- maxkwallace 6y ago
  Metaprogramming Ruby by Paolo Perrotta has the best explanation of Ruby's object system I've seen. It's a must-read for anyone working with Ruby, even if you have no interest in metaprogramming. Despite the title, it's a very approachable and widely-applicable book.
- schoolornot 6y ago
  I was in high school when Rails came out. I wanted a Mac so bad just for TextMate. But Rails and the whole philosophy of 37Signals even going back to Getting Real were total life changers. Everything from how I act to my writing to my presentation skills have all been influenced heavily by DHH and Jason Fried. If anyone has recommendations for soft skills books that are relatable to tech please let me know.
- ModernTabulator 6y ago
  I see that Rebuilding Rails doesn't mention a version number of the book, and sales page is actually very uninformative about the actual content. Elsewhere I see it was first published in 2012- How relevant do you find the 'latest' version to modern development? And what is the latest version, has it been updated for rails 6? Have you got any other recommendations for intermediate to advanced rails topics?
  - sgustard 6y ago
    I just downloaded the free chapter. I don't see a Rails version number, but it does mention Ruby 2.6 and the book is dated thusly: > This Version: April 2020 (Free-Chapters Edition) > Rebuilding Rails is copyright Noah Gibbs, 2012-2020
- cortesoft 6y ago
  I really should try Rails again. I LOVE ruby, but have been anti-rails for a while and I am not sure I am right for that. I got into Ruby programming through Rails... but in 2005. Rails was brand new (I think I was on version like 0.12 or something?), and I slowly moved away from it to things like Sinatra and Sequel. Rails had some huge performance issues, and active record was pretty unusable at any sort of scale unless you did a lot of custom SQL. I know it has come a long way in 15 years, I should try again
  - Mavvie 6y ago
    I'm sure it depends on the complexity of the app you're building. For simple crud-ish apps (ecommerce, online auctions, etc) I've found that I don't need to write even a single line of custom SQL, and performance is generally good (lots of N+1s, but these are easy to avoid with things like bullet). I also love being able to let Rails render most HTML, and the few things that need to be very dynamic you can just throw a single react component in without worrying about the usual SPA problems. If you're just prototyping stuff, I don't think you can beat Rails for productivity. But if you're targeting something more enterprise or large scale, I don't think it's a good choice. Go/Rust are so much faster (not that that matters a lot), and even things like C#/Java pretty nice to use nowadays.
    - christudor 6y ago
      "lots of N+1s, but these are easy to avoid with things like bullet" What is bullet?
      - andysomniac 6y ago
        It is a gem that tells you when you are accidentally making a N+1 query and suggests the best way to fix it in AR (it also tells you when you have over used includes that are not needed and other such tweaks to make to your queries).
      - mokkol 6y ago
        It is a plugin/gem that helps you track N+1 queries. https://github.com/flyerhzm/bullet https://github.com/flyerhzm/bullet
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  I read all of those and would like to add two more: 1) Learn to Program, by Chris Pine. It's the best book I've read on learning to program in any language. 2) Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer, by Topher Cyll. In a sense it wasn't "practical" at all. But it was a joyous eye-opener to all kinds of applications that turned me into a whirlwind of enthusiasm for months!
  - aplummer 6y ago
    > Learn to Program, by Chris Pine My first programming book, 10 years ago in a few months I think. Great read.
    - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      My favorite thing about it was how it made even trivially simple exercises fun by making the content humorous. At the beginning you really need that extra reward!
    - littleweep 6y ago
      7 years for me next month
  - chrispine 6y ago
    Aw, thanks! (3rd edition is in the works)
- jrumbut 6y ago
  The thing to read to really accelerate your Ruby/Rails education is the Rails source code, particularly the Model-adjacent classes and perhaps the router/controller as well. Then use the patterns you find! No greater joy than your own project specific functionality feeling like a native part of Rails and it tended to make me use more robust approaches.
- confidantlake 6y ago
  Just starting to learn rails myself so I am glad I found this thread. I have been going through https://open.appacademy.io/ https://open.appacademy.io/. It has a lot of example problems and projects which helps me learn. That is also why I like https://www.railstutorial.org/book https://www.railstutorial.org/book (although it is more like a well done tutorial than example problems).
Dirlewanger 6y ago
>“Rails generates a lot of functions and methods for you that aren’t defined in the code—I bet that will be hard to debug.” This was definitely the biggest obstacle for me learning Rails (and also Ruby at the same time). And also figuring out what part of the language was Ruby, and what part was Rails. Thankfully Rails' docs have come a long way from just OK to being some of the best in the business.
- thrownaway954 6y ago
  this is where rubymine really shines, you can right click and select "goto definition" which takes you right to the class that defines the method.
  - codeduck 6y ago
    Rubymine really is a fanatastic IDE.
  - Lio 6y ago
    In other editors either Solargraph (via LSP) or even just exuberant ctags will give you the same facility.
cmg 6y ago
I wish I'd had this post a couple years ago. I got into my current job by starting as a contractor, helping a friend out in an emergency situation. I've done PHP for over a decade, but had never written Ruby beyond some basic CLI scripts! I spent a few days learning how Rails works, and then how Heroku works (ephemeral filesystems were a new idea to me at the time), and finally got it all together. I also wish I'd put something like this together based on what I went through, but I'm glad this exists for others.
- thrownaway954 6y ago
  laravel is so similar to rails, it's scary. tbh... all mvc frameworks are similar. once you know one, it's extremely easy to pick up another one even if you don't know the language.
johnklos 6y ago
Nah. In a week, some component will need a security update, and your "hello, world" will break.
- brink 6y ago
  Rails has been relatively consistent over the past 10 years with few breaking changes, especially compared to most other frameworks.
  - jaimex2 6y ago
    Yep, most people get burned by other gems that aren't as thoughtful.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
    That's because they are not written in the changelog. From 5 to 5.1 the way dates are summed changed. In the changelog there was a point in changing the duration of a year, but not changing how dates are summed. This triggered a lot of problems in a software I worked on involving calculations with time and money. Finally, rails upgrades are always painful, unless your codebase is written by engineers that know how to avoid those pains. In which case, you probably will end up without rails (a lot of the features are useless to highly experienced engineers)
nickjj 6y ago
Rails is in a really good place. When I learned it back in 2015 there were so many resources for learning, it felt like every time I had a specific problem related to a feature I was implementing there was either a railscasts or gorails video on it, along with 10 blog posts and stack overflow results. I can only imagine how much better it is now. It has been one of the only semi-modern learning experiences where I was able to go from ground zero to building a real application just by reading the docs, getting started guides and Googling. Opinions combined with a massive community are an awesome combo. It's definitely noticeable when you try to learn a newer framework with a much smaller community and less opinions. You could end up Googling for what you might think is a common thing to solve only to find zero answers in sight, or there might be a few scattered posts that are outdated and partially implemented because everyone has their own opinions and go off in their own directions. It's just dead end after dead end and getting stuck trying to pioneer stuff without a strong grasp on how things work.
- mdoms 6y ago
  > It's definitely noticeable when you try to learn a newer framework with a much smaller community and less opinions. You could end up Googling for what you might think is a common thing to solve only to find zero answers in sight I have felt this exact way when I'm Googling for problems running Rails in modern cloud environments. It seems like there are loads of problems that are largely unsolved in the community at large when you want to go beyond Heroku and stand your app up in containers against cloud components using best practices. As a Rails newbie it has been downright painful and there have been many cases where I wish I was still writing a language like C# or Java where containers and modern cloud architectures have been embraced instead of shunned.
  - clairity 6y ago
    that seems beyond the scope of rails itself. why would you want to complicate deployment as a newbie? what problems are you facing that containerization specifically solves for you, rather than deploying to a (virtual) server directly? and why not heroku to start?
triangleman 6y ago
Years ago I put together a Rails app to store iPhone/iPad apps for curation. There was a backend that connected to the iTunes API and then I parsed the data elements I needed and entered them into the DB. The most infuriating thing was realizing that I needed to update the model with a new data element, or that some API responses didn't include the needed data. There was all this controller and model code and then the migrations every time I needed to make a change. Is this normal when coding any web application at all? I think if I had to do it again I'd just store the entire API response in a single "document" column and query it dynamically as needed. Did I stumble upon why many developers have moved to "noSQL" models of document storage?
- mitchellbryson 6y ago
  Try jsonb fields (postgres only maybe?) and the jsonb accessor gem: https://github.com/madeintandem/jsonb_accessor https://github.com/madeintandem/jsonb_accessor I use this for prototyping new apps a lot, where I'm not sure on the best design. Then I migrate to proper database columns when I'm sure of something. Feels like the best of both worlds to me.
  - triangleman 6y ago
    Yeah I think I learned this the hard way: even making DB columns can be a premature optimization.
- jmuguy 6y ago
  Not sure exactly what you’re describing. If the iTunes api was constantly changing that’s sort of an issue in and of itself, beyond whatever database you’re using.
- hirundo 6y ago
  > I think if I had to do it again I'd just store the entire API response in a single "document" column and query it dynamically as needed. You'd quickly find that it is a lot of code to parse that column and read and write data to it, compared to a normalized database wrapped in ActiveRecord. I've done just that, and it's just a lot more work in the long run. A relational database really is a good thing when you want to slice and dice that data and keep it consistent.
pdoub 6y ago
Anyone doing/thinking about Rails in 2020 should give matestack a try :) reactive user interfaces in pure Ruby (and Vue.js under the hood!) https://github.com/matestack/matestack-ui-core https://github.com/matestack/matestack-ui-core
- nolantait 6y ago
  You can roll this yourself with Cells (https://github.com/trailblazer/cells https://github.com/trailblazer/cells) and Stimulus Reflex (https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/ https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/). I've been watching view_component too but the simplicity of cells keeps me happy. I've been working full time using both and love the flexibility. My process is mostly using state machines on cells which take in a struct and output the html for that state with Stimulus Reflex.
  - jonnymoe 6y ago
    Trailblazer Cells and Stimulus Reflex are great tools, but one big advantage of matestack (https://matestack.io https://matestack.io) is to write UI components in pure Ruby, giving you the possibility to use Ruby's language features creating a really dry and clean UI implementation while having a lot of fun doing so! Adding the reactive core components on top saving you a lot of time and effort creating reactive UIs in pure Ruby. Compared to Stimulus Reflex, you have to write less code and manage less added complexity. That's at least my experience. But as said: Cells and Stimulus Reflex are great projects, don't get me wrong. I just love the pure Ruby thing ;)
- czbond 6y ago
  @pdoub - can you elaborate on the Vue under the hood? I love ruby, and like Vue a lot. Does Matestack do a translation layer from Ruby -> Vue in JS? Eg: transpile, etc.
  - jonnymoe 6y ago
    Matestack's reactive core components are built on pure Vue.js components. When a reactive component is rendered, Matestack renders a HTML component tag, passing in configuration via props and ships that to the browser. Vue.js on the browser then detects these component tags and mounts the appropriate Vue.js component, which reads the configuration coming from the props and perform the desired (configured) functionality. The HTML within the component tag is used as the inline template for the Vue.js component. It's rendering HTML tags out of pure Ruby on the one hand, and mounting pure Vue.js component on top of that in the browser on the other hand.
lxe 6y ago
> For example, take the idea of inheritance. Low level thinking might sound like, “All the other classes are adding < ApplicationController if they want to use this method, so I need to do that too. Otherwise it throws an error.’’ > But high level thinking might be more like, “I need to access the ApplicationController class’ methods. Ruby supports inheritance, so I’ll add < ApplicationController to the class definition to let the compiler know that I’m inheriting it.” I don't think this is "high level" vs "low level" thinking. Both are just different approaches to discovering the same thing. It's akin to learning guitar through tabulature vs standard notation.
- crispyporkbites 6y ago
  The difference is in the “it throws an error” bit- if you’re including lines of code because it makes your program work but you don’t know why, you’re also potentially introducing side effects and other behaviours that you don’t understand, which will bite you later.
siquick 6y ago
Asking someone to learn a brand new framework/language in a week as part of a job interview is pretty harsh.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  Most companies will hire a smart person and give them the time to ramp up on the job... I had to learn 3 languages at my very first backend job. They hired me because I was smart. It took me over a month to get fully onboarded and that was their expectation.
- pugio 6y ago
  That's actually exactly the kind of skill I'd look for in a new hire. I don't care which crunchy items you list on your resume so much as your ability to learn and integrate new technical information quickly (as well as a host of other skills, of course). That said, learning a new thing does take a lot of time, so if I were asking a person to do that I would either commit to hiring them if they complete the learning challenge, or pay them for their time spent that week.
  - siquick 6y ago
    > That's actually exactly the kind of skill I'd look for in a new hire. I don't care which crunchy items you list on your resume so much as your ability to learn and integrate new technical information quickly (as well as a host of other skills, of course). Of course, but asking someone to spend a lot of hours on this in a week, with no guarantee of a job at the end of it is not a direction this industry needs to go. People have full time jobs, and parenting/carer/community responsibilities. I was hired for a job a couple of years ago which required a lot of work on a new framework I had never touched before, and rather than the interview being around the framework, they gave me a month of full time employment to get up to speed - on the understanding that if it just wasn't clicking then we would both walk away with no hard feelings.
    - anonytrary 6y ago
      > Of course, but asking someone to spend a lot of hours on this in a week, with no guarantee of a job at the end of it is not a direction this industry needs to go I have never seen this from any serious employers. If someone is asking you to do this, then go work somewhere else. Employers are expecting that you learn on the job.
herpderperator 6y ago
I love rails, but despite its presense for over a decade, it doesn't feel mature. Something as basic as a native left join in ActiveRecord wasn't added until Rails 5.0, on June 30, 2016. Something as basic as native multiple database support wasn't released until Rails 6.0, on August 16, 2019, 15 years after its initial release... These are just two examples.
- joevandyk 6y ago
  I've worked with Rails for since 2005, I've never needed those features yet.
- tyre 6y ago
  Multi-database support is not "basic". At what point do you need that? What percentage of users do? Regardless, it was fully supported in gems for years before it went into Rails. It's nice to have it in core. But to say that Rails doesn't feel mature without it? Come on.
  - zbentley 6y ago
    > At what point do you need that? What percentage of users do? In my experience, rather a lot.
    - obiefernandez 6y ago
      If you need to connect to multiple databases at a time for your business logic then you're doing it wrong.
      - zbentley 6y ago
        ...are you serious? Virtually every software shop I've worked at has had most backend code communicating with multiple databases to get the job done. Sometimes those databases were behind [micro]service abstractions and the communication was indirected by RPC/one-way async dispatch. Sometimes it wasn't. But multiple backend datastores' contents were required for most business operations. The only places I've worked with that didn't need that were very, very small (single digits of thousands or fewer users).
mudlus 6y ago
Now that Rails has StimuluseReflex / ActionCable (which is kind of an additional learning curve), it's got some incredible potential. I was skeptical of WebPacker at first, too, but also have grown to love it.
- andrei_says_ 6y ago
  Love it, just don’t touch it ;)
e12e 6y ago
> is there a version manager I should be using? > I am familiar with nvm and pyenv for managing Node and Python versions, respectively, however the tutorial I was following did not mention any Ruby version manager. I took to the internet and found the highly popular, rbenv. If you want "just" a version manager for ruby, I'd go with rbenv. But if you use, say, node and python too - I'd go with asdf: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-ruby https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-ruby Keeps the stampede of VMs out of your bashrc.
- richjdsmith 6y ago
  I've since moved my ruby projects over to asdf for its simplicity, and the fact that you're going to be stuck using something to manage node anyways.
- donw 6y ago
  That's a great share! Didn't know about `asdf`, and not having to load ~4 different language version managers is a solid win. It also looks like `asdf` Does The Right Thing and uses shims, unlike `rvm`, which, as of the last time I checked, overrides shell builtins, which is a straight-up WTF where I come from.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  I’m still on rbebv amnbs clones like nodenv.
wholien 6y ago
On an "attitude" level, it's very useful to understand the doctrine of Ruby on Rails (RoR), as written by DHH [1]. Especially if you're coming from some other paradigms / languages etc., RoR can feel quite different. Understanding the philosophy is a nice window to kickstart the "way" of RoR. On a more practical level, I've found the official Ruby on Rails guides [2] to be super helpful. I started a RoR job almost a year ago without having done any Ruby at all (I had a Python background). I probably should have gone through the tutorials in the OP and in other comments (rails tutorial book comes to mind). But since I didn't, I used the RoR guides A LOT. And they were super useful. Everything from routes, to controllers, to ActiveModel and migrations. They give you a good starting point to get most of the job done. Highly recommend looking at the relevant guides if you are working on specific RoR things! 1: https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine/ https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine/ 2: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ https://guides.rubyonrails.org/
leetrout 6y ago
I took a rails job by accident- I knew rails was in use but I was interviewed in Go and talked about new things going on in Go micro services. I didn’t expect 40 hours a week of rails / ember JS work and that’s my fault. I have 12 years with Django and I was shocked there wasn’t the equivalent of the Django tutorial. Everyone says the rails tutorial is good and I’m sure it’s worth the money but no one at work endorsed it (nor provided recommendations for any Ruby / rails tutorials). Coming from Python, Go, JS/Typescript (react, vue, etc) in my most recent experiences it was really rough. I couldn’t understand some of the rails magic and the docs were horrible compared to Django. Ruby Mine IDE was essential. I learned how much I love DDL management via code (Django ORM or SQL Alchemy) and how active record did just enough to fool you (which is common in other ORMs). In the end I left the job for a full time Go position and I’ve missed Rspec every day. The rails (or Ruby in general) toolset really impressed me and I’m using Ginkgo at my current job to get my fix for BDD / specs.
- donw 6y ago
  > The rails (or Ruby in general) toolset really impressed me and I’m using Ginkgo at my current job to get my fix for BDD / specs. This is, I suspect, the biggest win from the Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Rubyland went hard-core TDD a long while back -- I suspect largely due to the influence of Pivotal Labs -- and the maturity of the toolset and automation really reflects that. Every time I work in another language, I find myself very much missing both the Ruby toolchain and (depending on the language) the everything-is-an-object approach. Not to say that Ruby is perfect, but the tooling really is that good, which is pretty amazing given that Ruby isn't exactly the most parseable of languages -- although on that front, I've got a lot of hope for Crystal: https://crystal-lang.org https://crystal-lang.org
- ritchiea 6y ago
  It’s really surprisingly difficult to jump between Python and Ruby. And Rails and Django. They are just similar enough that you think the switch shouldn’t be so tough but all the differences really bite you. Whereas jumping into a completely different ecosystem like JS or Go you don’t have the part of your brain telling you “this isn’t that different, you’ll be fine, look for something familiar.”
quest88 6y ago
I love rails. I want to build products and not muck with tech stacks. Rails and the ecosystem make it easy.
- czbond 6y ago
  This is my view. I'm a CompSci person who hates mucking in the toolsets and language peculiarities of stacks, but loves product ;) I have never been able to be more 'meta' in product than I have felt with Ruby/Rails.
nlh 6y ago
> Blocks are one of the most confusing, yet most powerful elements of Ruby. They allow you to group expressions, save them to a variable, and even pass them to a method. I’m still getting used to blocks and realizing their usefulness, but overall I feel that they condense a lot of code, and also make code more reusable and extensible. Agreed re: confusion! I've been using Ruby (and Crystal) for years and I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that while I fully understand how to _use_ blocks, I haven't really truly grokked them. I kinda use them and use yield and it all works. But! Something clicked recently, and I'm not sure why it took so long (maybe it was lots more experience with JavaScript lately?) and I feel kinda dumb that I just realized this: Blocks are just anonymous functions. That's it. Yield just means "call the anonymous function that was passed in". Yield with arguments (which always confused the hell out of me) is, again, just calling that same anonymous function with arguments. (I think?)
- danmaz74 6y ago
  What ruby blocks have in common with js anonymous functions is that they are closures, so that might be what made them click when you learned about those.
- jes5199 6y ago
  yes, exactly! Anonymous functions weren't as common in other languages when Ruby first got popular, so the older Ruby devs had to learn about blocks without talking about anonymous functions, and I think they mostly haven't realized that the world has changed and there's a common terminology that people coming in from other languages will know. The one big quirk is that Ruby syntax doesn't let you assign a block to a variable like you can assign a function to a variable in javascript. But you can work around that by using the lambda keyword or Proc.new with a block, which will wrap it into an object. Then you can use the & sigil to pass that object into a method that's expecting a block
- topher6345 6y ago
  > Blocks are just anonymous functions. That's it. Blocks in ruby have non-local return, unlike anonymous functions. compare `[1,2,3].map {|e| return true if e > 1 }` in ruby to `[1,2,3].map(e => {if(e > 1) { return true}})` in javascript. The ruby version will return a single `true` value, while the javascript version will return an array. This post walks through a example that resembles my experience writing bugs when I knew way more ruby than javascript: https://github.com/raganwald-deprecated/homoiconic/blob/master/2010/04/blocks.md https://github.com/raganwald-deprecated/homoiconic/blob/mast...
cambalache 6y ago
I am one of those obnoxious people who is trying all the time new web technologies, without deepening the skill for years in just one. Out all the frameworks I have used (Django,Phoenix,Node/Express in all its flavors,.NET Core, Echo) Rails is by far the one in which I feel more productive. Ruby is a lovely language, the ecosystem is mature, there is always a gem for everything and for the kind of applications I do (just 1-3 developers) Rails suits the needs perfectly. All the rest have been very solid and enjoyable frameworks (except for the Node-based ones, sorry) but I still prefer Rails.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  Just curious why the (negative) callout for Node-based frameworks like express? How, technically, were they inferior to Ruby (or any of the other languages you listed)?
  - cambalache 6y ago
    I like Javascript and Express, so in that sense they are OK. I hate the brittleness of the ecosystem, the "flavor of the month" character, and the explosion of options, there are people who like that setup: small programs that you can plug and play to create your whole stack, I find that tiresome, I prefer big monoliths in which the best options and practices are universally agreed upon. Ah and I hate Typescript, nice idea, but when you spend 30% of your time looking after all those custom types and end up using an ":any" hack to make it work, this leaves a bad taste in your mouth. If I am going to use strong types I would choose an actual strongly-typed language for that, C# is great.
    - halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
      Somewhat ironic but not sure if you know, Typescript is made by Microsoft and the lead Typescript language architect is Anders Hejlsberg who also was heavily involved in the creation and architecture of C#.
      - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
lubesGordi 6y ago
I'm a back end C++/rust type and I script with Python. If I wanted to build a front end, is there any reason I'd use Ruby/Rails over Django? I'm not familiar with Rails but I'm curious if it's worthwhile to pick up.
- yazmeya 6y ago
  The neat thing about Rails is that going from zero to a running database-backed app is done in a ridiculously few number of keystrokes that invoke quite a bit of under-the-hood magic in terms of routing, form and view scaffolding, etc. Django is kind of similar, in that you don't need to write a ton of code to get a basic app in the browser, but it exposes a bit more of itself as you get going right away, and you need to work a bit connecting things together. As far as mature, large Django and Rails apps – the similarities outweigh the differences, in my opinion. I would recommend doing the basic Rails tutorial, it really doesn't take that much time.
- valzam 6y ago
  Unless you are interested in learning ruby or have some specific gripes with how django does things (it is very opinionated) I would say no.
- amw-zero 6y ago
  All web frameworks are equivalent.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  Rails is a bit more productive. Being a slightly more-expressive language, Ruby has a considerable edge when it comes to DSLs. Whether it's worth it for you to learn or not depends on how quickly you can pick it up and how important the web app part is to you. Edit: Why is yazmeya's sibling comment flagged? It's not a glib one-liner and it's clearly an attempt to be helpful.
- burlesona 6y ago
  I wouldn't recommend Rails as front-end only. It's fine as a full-stack framework, and rather nice for quickly building out a back-end API, but not really compelling if you're only using the front-end side of things IMO. That said, I would argue that Ruby is a very similar but nicer scripting language than Python (particularly for general utility / glue scripts), so if you enjoy scripting in Python you would probably find Ruby easy to pick up and potentially a nice compliment to what you already know.
dstorm1 6y ago
Is it just me or is Rails really complex? Its abstractions are so far removed from anything familiar (HTTP, SQL) that its difficult to understand what is happening unless you deeply understand the framework.
- burlesona 6y ago
  Rails is somewhat complex, but it's a weird kind of complexity. In some ways it is like React: it's almost easier if you learn it first, before you know what it's doing under the hood, so you're not asking yourself "how" all the time. The good thing about Rails is it's very well-documented, and if you just work your way through the entire Rails guide or the Rails Tutorial, by the end it all clicks together and makes a lot of sense, and from there on it becomes really easy.
- chowned 6y ago
  The point is to rely on the abstractions. :) I get similar feelings, especially having been burned by software in the past that purported to abstract things properly. But perhaps unlike other frameworks/libraries, I think Rails has solid abstractions. Of course they're not perfect, but much like abstractions provided by an OS, they are complex, and you mostly don't have to worry about implementation details. (And when you do, that's okay, because the documentation is solid too and the code is available.) I've been working with Django lately and I definitely had to learn to let go and trust stuff like the ORM. But after watching migrations get handled automatically and easily adding foreign key relationships to tables, I was hooked. I used to be firmly in the "almost never ORM" camp, but that's changed.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  The whole thing centers on ActiveRecord. Understand that, and you're basically done. Be warned, though. Once you do, you'll never want to go back to any other ORM's.
yters 6y ago
ruby coders always seem so happy closest i can think of is clojure coders, they also seem quite pleased
moralsupply 6y ago
Ruby on Rails: learn in a week, spend 4 years dealing with the mess you've created. Then jump to Clojure and start again...
wwright 6y ago
This seems like an incredibly presumptive and onerous process to expect an interviewee to go through.
codetheory 6y ago
Lack of a lot negative comments on this post is surprising
- burlesona 6y ago
  The "current hotness" always gets praise, while the penultimate hotness gets piles of scorn. I think the JS ecosystem is fading in hotness - not sure exactly where everyone is going, but Go, Rust, and Python all seem pretty hot these days, so we'll see. Regardless, that means Ruby/Rails is no longer the penultimate hotness, it's merely a boring old technology that does what it does. And it turns out, Ruby is a lovely language (with its flaws), and Rails is a useful and impressively productive framework (which has cast a long shadow on the entire web development world). So I think the narrative is warming back up.
- confidantlake 6y ago
  I have found the rails community to be fairly positive.
jaredcwhite 6y ago
I hesitate to state that Ruby is making a comeback, because I don't think it ever really faded (isrubydead.com ;-) )…but it definitely feels like the momentum is picking up. 2021 is going to be amazing. Ruby 3. Rails 6.1+ along with new HEY-derived innovations. ViewComponent + StimulusReflex is quickly becoming a powerhouse combo. A ton of useful gems coming out all the time. I myself am furiously working on making Bridgetown one of the world's great static site generators. Honestly, there's never been a better time to be a Rubyist than right now.
- afhammad 6y ago
  The market (job vacancies) seem to imply otherwise, I rarely see it mentioned in comparison to Python, Go, PHP.
  - joelbluminator 6y ago
    At least in the U.S there are more Ruby jobs than PHP, so what you're saying isn't accurate. In Europe (outside UK) Ruby is weaker I agree; php/.net seem to be way more popular.
    - afhammad 6y ago
      Yeh, i'm going off London job market.
      - joelbluminator 6y ago
        Hmm what do you base that on? I'm genuinely curious. Looking at Linkedin I see a lot of Ruby jobs in London, some in really top notch companies. To me London seems like a great place to be a Rubyist. Just for comparison's sake this is from Linkedin (London Metrpoloitan): Ruby: 1238 Node: 1940 PHP: 1332 Rust: 157 Python: 9208 Golang: 588 (might be called Go in many jobs though) Conclusion: Ruby on par with php, less popular than Node but not by orders of magnitute, and used way less than Python. But comparing it to web development languages like PHP/Node, it's right there with them. If anything Ruby is in bad form in mainland Europe (France, Germany, Netherlands) where for whatever reason PHP is king for startups. Now for frameworks: Rails: 480 Laravel: 41 Django: 535 Symfony: 164 Conclusion: Rails is really up there with any other major framework. Could be that some job posts don't mention the framework, but I'm going with the data we have. Some famous Ruby shops I know are from London: Deliveroo, GoCardless, Funding Circle, Babylon Health. I honestly don't see how this is bad.
codecutter 6y ago
I recently started learning Ruby on Rails about 3 months ago. I had zero knowledge about any web programming. HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript is all new to me. Using Ubuntu was also foreign to me, but I tried. I started watching videos on YouTube, especially from Traversy Media. Then I joined a few courses on Udemy. Reading books was painful, so I started actual working on code. I am building app to create a portal, giving information about non-profits. (planning to release my rookie code in AGPL license). Having a project in mind really helps. I really liked the simplicity of Rails' structured way, but there is a lot to learn and it gets overwhelming, but it is fun and I like it. It was also motivating to know that I could learn programming at age 53. Heartfelt Thanks to all those unknown faces on the internet who are selflessly helping others like me learn new things. Now I realized, that you are never too old to learn something new. Yes, Ruby on Rails is fun.
SmellTheGlove 6y ago
I won't add any value to this thread, just wanted to say thanks to the folks that piled on with additional learning resources. I've always _meant_ to pick up Ruby at some point, and it feels like there's a lot of great information out there to get started.

497 points by Tenhundfeld 6y ago

Having picked up Rails 9 years ago and having been using it literally daily ever since, it's joyful to read from someone that is just starting. I also started with https://www.railstutorial.org/book https://www.railstutorial.org/book, highly recommend it. I also loved Metaprogramming Ruby (Paolo Perrotta) - it's more advanced and starts to open your mind to how Rails magic DSL's were built. I just bought today "Rebuilding Rails" (https://rebuilding-rails.com/ https://rebuilding-rails.com/), heard great things about it. Ruby and Rails are amazing, and I wouldn't trade it for any other language/framework out there.

weaksauce 6y ago
the other book that is great for ruby is eloquent ruby. one of the best programming books I've read and one of the few that I've read cover to cover instead of piecemeal.
WJW 6y ago
The Rails tutorial is of exceptional quality. I wish more software had explanations that clear.
raesene9 6y ago
Those are great resources. One I'd add to it, for general ruby programming, is the Well Grounded Rubyist (https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-rubyist-third-edition https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-rubyist-thir...) . It's been kept up to date (3rd edition was released in 2019) and I found it very readable and informative.
- ashconnor 6y ago
  Great book. I own the second edition.
- Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
  Also I will add Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby, by Sandi Metz (https://www.poodr.com/ https://www.poodr.com/). It was a great help to me when I was first beginning to self teach programming years ago. A lot of it applies no matter the language; I haven't written Ruby in probably 4 years but the principles in that book guide my programming to this day.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jmcgough 6y ago
  That was one of the books I picked up early in my career and still keep a well-loved, dog-eared copy. It's information-dense without being overwhelming, and teaches a lot of important Ruby concepts. I'm glad to see it's being kept up to date.
- sciurus 6y ago
  Agreed, this is a great book. In the past I used to read and write a lot of Ruby. An earlier edition of the book was the single resource that taught me the most. The only programming language book I've enjoyed and benefited from as much since then is Fluent Python.
- jandinter 6y ago
  Highly recommended! I started with the Rails Tutorial as well and read The Well-Grounded Rubyist afterwards to get more in-depth with Ruby. After that, I bought Bob Race‘s tutorial Build a Saas App with Rails which covers more practical aspects of building a multi-user SaaS app using well-known gems (instead of building everything by myself as in the Rails tutorial): https://leanpub.com/basair6 https://leanpub.com/basair6
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tedkimble 6y ago
Love the Rebuilding Rails concept! I'm doing a very similar thing in Ruby, focused more on "web application development from first principles" (https://theodorekimble.ck.page/e0bb43b156 https://theodorekimble.ck.page/e0bb43b156). I know I better absorb concepts if I can trace them back to a more fundamental "truth". Curious to hear if anyone else has found success with Rebuilding Rails, and what they found most helpful.
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  If you want to do the same thing (build up from 1st principles) with CSS, I ravingly endorse Axiomatic CSS as defined and implemented in https://every-layout.dev https://every-layout.dev Disclaimers: no affiliation, just a very satisfied customer. IME the free content alone is illuminating, and having paid $100 to access to the full "book" incl all the layouts' implementation it was a bargain.
  - Arkdy 6y ago
    Starting my projects from every-layout instead of using foundation/bootstrap has been like the move away from jQuery as js developed.
andruby 6y ago
I learned RoR from the wonderful Agile Web Development with Rails (2nd edition). David Black’s “Ruby for Rails” and a little later “Eloquent Ruby” helped me to better grasp the difference between Ruby the language and Rails the framework. I was a kid, and read the first two books 14 years ago. One on a holiday in Kenya and the other in Egypt. No distractions, just travel, family and reading. These days it seems like a lot of junior developers want to learn it more interactively. I hope books stay popular. In my opinion, they do a great job at explaining the why & the reasoning, instead of just showing you how.
maxkwallace 6y ago
Metaprogramming Ruby by Paolo Perrotta has the best explanation of Ruby's object system I've seen. It's a must-read for anyone working with Ruby, even if you have no interest in metaprogramming. Despite the title, it's a very approachable and widely-applicable book.
schoolornot 6y ago
I was in high school when Rails came out. I wanted a Mac so bad just for TextMate. But Rails and the whole philosophy of 37Signals even going back to Getting Real were total life changers. Everything from how I act to my writing to my presentation skills have all been influenced heavily by DHH and Jason Fried. If anyone has recommendations for soft skills books that are relatable to tech please let me know.
ModernTabulator 6y ago
I see that Rebuilding Rails doesn't mention a version number of the book, and sales page is actually very uninformative about the actual content. Elsewhere I see it was first published in 2012- How relevant do you find the 'latest' version to modern development? And what is the latest version, has it been updated for rails 6? Have you got any other recommendations for intermediate to advanced rails topics?
- sgustard 6y ago
  I just downloaded the free chapter. I don't see a Rails version number, but it does mention Ruby 2.6 and the book is dated thusly: > This Version: April 2020 (Free-Chapters Edition) > Rebuilding Rails is copyright Noah Gibbs, 2012-2020
cortesoft 6y ago
I really should try Rails again. I LOVE ruby, but have been anti-rails for a while and I am not sure I am right for that. I got into Ruby programming through Rails... but in 2005. Rails was brand new (I think I was on version like 0.12 or something?), and I slowly moved away from it to things like Sinatra and Sequel. Rails had some huge performance issues, and active record was pretty unusable at any sort of scale unless you did a lot of custom SQL. I know it has come a long way in 15 years, I should try again
- Mavvie 6y ago
  I'm sure it depends on the complexity of the app you're building. For simple crud-ish apps (ecommerce, online auctions, etc) I've found that I don't need to write even a single line of custom SQL, and performance is generally good (lots of N+1s, but these are easy to avoid with things like bullet). I also love being able to let Rails render most HTML, and the few things that need to be very dynamic you can just throw a single react component in without worrying about the usual SPA problems. If you're just prototyping stuff, I don't think you can beat Rails for productivity. But if you're targeting something more enterprise or large scale, I don't think it's a good choice. Go/Rust are so much faster (not that that matters a lot), and even things like C#/Java pretty nice to use nowadays.
  - christudor 6y ago
    "lots of N+1s, but these are easy to avoid with things like bullet" What is bullet?
    - andysomniac 6y ago
      It is a gem that tells you when you are accidentally making a N+1 query and suggests the best way to fix it in AR (it also tells you when you have over used includes that are not needed and other such tweaks to make to your queries).
    - mokkol 6y ago
      It is a plugin/gem that helps you track N+1 queries. https://github.com/flyerhzm/bullet https://github.com/flyerhzm/bullet
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
I read all of those and would like to add two more: 1) Learn to Program, by Chris Pine. It's the best book I've read on learning to program in any language. 2) Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer, by Topher Cyll. In a sense it wasn't "practical" at all. But it was a joyous eye-opener to all kinds of applications that turned me into a whirlwind of enthusiasm for months!
- aplummer 6y ago
  > Learn to Program, by Chris Pine My first programming book, 10 years ago in a few months I think. Great read.
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    My favorite thing about it was how it made even trivially simple exercises fun by making the content humorous. At the beginning you really need that extra reward!
  - littleweep 6y ago
    7 years for me next month
- chrispine 6y ago
  Aw, thanks! (3rd edition is in the works)
jrumbut 6y ago
The thing to read to really accelerate your Ruby/Rails education is the Rails source code, particularly the Model-adjacent classes and perhaps the router/controller as well. Then use the patterns you find! No greater joy than your own project specific functionality feeling like a native part of Rails and it tended to make me use more robust approaches.
confidantlake 6y ago
Just starting to learn rails myself so I am glad I found this thread. I have been going through https://open.appacademy.io/ https://open.appacademy.io/. It has a lot of example problems and projects which helps me learn. That is also why I like https://www.railstutorial.org/book https://www.railstutorial.org/book (although it is more like a well done tutorial than example problems).

Dirlewanger 6y ago

>“Rails generates a lot of functions and methods for you that aren’t defined in the code—I bet that will be hard to debug.” This was definitely the biggest obstacle for me learning Rails (and also Ruby at the same time). And also figuring out what part of the language was Ruby, and what part was Rails. Thankfully Rails' docs have come a long way from just OK to being some of the best in the business.

thrownaway954 6y ago
this is where rubymine really shines, you can right click and select "goto definition" which takes you right to the class that defines the method.
- codeduck 6y ago
  Rubymine really is a fanatastic IDE.
- Lio 6y ago
  In other editors either Solargraph (via LSP) or even just exuberant ctags will give you the same facility.

cmg 6y ago

I wish I'd had this post a couple years ago. I got into my current job by starting as a contractor, helping a friend out in an emergency situation. I've done PHP for over a decade, but had never written Ruby beyond some basic CLI scripts! I spent a few days learning how Rails works, and then how Heroku works (ephemeral filesystems were a new idea to me at the time), and finally got it all together. I also wish I'd put something like this together based on what I went through, but I'm glad this exists for others.

thrownaway954 6y ago
laravel is so similar to rails, it's scary. tbh... all mvc frameworks are similar. once you know one, it's extremely easy to pick up another one even if you don't know the language.

johnklos 6y ago

Nah. In a week, some component will need a security update, and your "hello, world" will break.

brink 6y ago
Rails has been relatively consistent over the past 10 years with few breaking changes, especially compared to most other frameworks.
- jaimex2 6y ago
  Yep, most people get burned by other gems that aren't as thoughtful.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
  That's because they are not written in the changelog. From 5 to 5.1 the way dates are summed changed. In the changelog there was a point in changing the duration of a year, but not changing how dates are summed. This triggered a lot of problems in a software I worked on involving calculations with time and money. Finally, rails upgrades are always painful, unless your codebase is written by engineers that know how to avoid those pains. In which case, you probably will end up without rails (a lot of the features are useless to highly experienced engineers)

nickjj 6y ago

Rails is in a really good place. When I learned it back in 2015 there were so many resources for learning, it felt like every time I had a specific problem related to a feature I was implementing there was either a railscasts or gorails video on it, along with 10 blog posts and stack overflow results. I can only imagine how much better it is now. It has been one of the only semi-modern learning experiences where I was able to go from ground zero to building a real application just by reading the docs, getting started guides and Googling. Opinions combined with a massive community are an awesome combo. It's definitely noticeable when you try to learn a newer framework with a much smaller community and less opinions. You could end up Googling for what you might think is a common thing to solve only to find zero answers in sight, or there might be a few scattered posts that are outdated and partially implemented because everyone has their own opinions and go off in their own directions. It's just dead end after dead end and getting stuck trying to pioneer stuff without a strong grasp on how things work.

mdoms 6y ago
> It's definitely noticeable when you try to learn a newer framework with a much smaller community and less opinions. You could end up Googling for what you might think is a common thing to solve only to find zero answers in sight I have felt this exact way when I'm Googling for problems running Rails in modern cloud environments. It seems like there are loads of problems that are largely unsolved in the community at large when you want to go beyond Heroku and stand your app up in containers against cloud components using best practices. As a Rails newbie it has been downright painful and there have been many cases where I wish I was still writing a language like C# or Java where containers and modern cloud architectures have been embraced instead of shunned.
- clairity 6y ago
  that seems beyond the scope of rails itself. why would you want to complicate deployment as a newbie? what problems are you facing that containerization specifically solves for you, rather than deploying to a (virtual) server directly? and why not heroku to start?

triangleman 6y ago

Years ago I put together a Rails app to store iPhone/iPad apps for curation. There was a backend that connected to the iTunes API and then I parsed the data elements I needed and entered them into the DB. The most infuriating thing was realizing that I needed to update the model with a new data element, or that some API responses didn't include the needed data. There was all this controller and model code and then the migrations every time I needed to make a change. Is this normal when coding any web application at all? I think if I had to do it again I'd just store the entire API response in a single "document" column and query it dynamically as needed. Did I stumble upon why many developers have moved to "noSQL" models of document storage?

mitchellbryson 6y ago
Try jsonb fields (postgres only maybe?) and the jsonb accessor gem: https://github.com/madeintandem/jsonb_accessor https://github.com/madeintandem/jsonb_accessor I use this for prototyping new apps a lot, where I'm not sure on the best design. Then I migrate to proper database columns when I'm sure of something. Feels like the best of both worlds to me.
- triangleman 6y ago
  Yeah I think I learned this the hard way: even making DB columns can be a premature optimization.
jmuguy 6y ago
Not sure exactly what you’re describing. If the iTunes api was constantly changing that’s sort of an issue in and of itself, beyond whatever database you’re using.
hirundo 6y ago
> I think if I had to do it again I'd just store the entire API response in a single "document" column and query it dynamically as needed. You'd quickly find that it is a lot of code to parse that column and read and write data to it, compared to a normalized database wrapped in ActiveRecord. I've done just that, and it's just a lot more work in the long run. A relational database really is a good thing when you want to slice and dice that data and keep it consistent.

pdoub 6y ago

Anyone doing/thinking about Rails in 2020 should give matestack a try :) reactive user interfaces in pure Ruby (and Vue.js under the hood!) https://github.com/matestack/matestack-ui-core https://github.com/matestack/matestack-ui-core

nolantait 6y ago
You can roll this yourself with Cells (https://github.com/trailblazer/cells https://github.com/trailblazer/cells) and Stimulus Reflex (https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/ https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/). I've been watching view_component too but the simplicity of cells keeps me happy. I've been working full time using both and love the flexibility. My process is mostly using state machines on cells which take in a struct and output the html for that state with Stimulus Reflex.
- jonnymoe 6y ago
  Trailblazer Cells and Stimulus Reflex are great tools, but one big advantage of matestack (https://matestack.io https://matestack.io) is to write UI components in pure Ruby, giving you the possibility to use Ruby's language features creating a really dry and clean UI implementation while having a lot of fun doing so! Adding the reactive core components on top saving you a lot of time and effort creating reactive UIs in pure Ruby. Compared to Stimulus Reflex, you have to write less code and manage less added complexity. That's at least my experience. But as said: Cells and Stimulus Reflex are great projects, don't get me wrong. I just love the pure Ruby thing ;)
czbond 6y ago
@pdoub - can you elaborate on the Vue under the hood? I love ruby, and like Vue a lot. Does Matestack do a translation layer from Ruby -> Vue in JS? Eg: transpile, etc.
- jonnymoe 6y ago
  Matestack's reactive core components are built on pure Vue.js components. When a reactive component is rendered, Matestack renders a HTML component tag, passing in configuration via props and ships that to the browser. Vue.js on the browser then detects these component tags and mounts the appropriate Vue.js component, which reads the configuration coming from the props and perform the desired (configured) functionality. The HTML within the component tag is used as the inline template for the Vue.js component. It's rendering HTML tags out of pure Ruby on the one hand, and mounting pure Vue.js component on top of that in the browser on the other hand.

lxe 6y ago

> For example, take the idea of inheritance. Low level thinking might sound like, “All the other classes are adding < ApplicationController if they want to use this method, so I need to do that too. Otherwise it throws an error.’’ > But high level thinking might be more like, “I need to access the ApplicationController class’ methods. Ruby supports inheritance, so I’ll add < ApplicationController to the class definition to let the compiler know that I’m inheriting it.” I don't think this is "high level" vs "low level" thinking. Both are just different approaches to discovering the same thing. It's akin to learning guitar through tabulature vs standard notation.

crispyporkbites 6y ago
The difference is in the “it throws an error” bit- if you’re including lines of code because it makes your program work but you don’t know why, you’re also potentially introducing side effects and other behaviours that you don’t understand, which will bite you later.

siquick 6y ago

Asking someone to learn a brand new framework/language in a week as part of a job interview is pretty harsh.

anonytrary 6y ago
Most companies will hire a smart person and give them the time to ramp up on the job... I had to learn 3 languages at my very first backend job. They hired me because I was smart. It took me over a month to get fully onboarded and that was their expectation.
pugio 6y ago
That's actually exactly the kind of skill I'd look for in a new hire. I don't care which crunchy items you list on your resume so much as your ability to learn and integrate new technical information quickly (as well as a host of other skills, of course). That said, learning a new thing does take a lot of time, so if I were asking a person to do that I would either commit to hiring them if they complete the learning challenge, or pay them for their time spent that week.
- siquick 6y ago
  > That's actually exactly the kind of skill I'd look for in a new hire. I don't care which crunchy items you list on your resume so much as your ability to learn and integrate new technical information quickly (as well as a host of other skills, of course). Of course, but asking someone to spend a lot of hours on this in a week, with no guarantee of a job at the end of it is not a direction this industry needs to go. People have full time jobs, and parenting/carer/community responsibilities. I was hired for a job a couple of years ago which required a lot of work on a new framework I had never touched before, and rather than the interview being around the framework, they gave me a month of full time employment to get up to speed - on the understanding that if it just wasn't clicking then we would both walk away with no hard feelings.
  - anonytrary 6y ago
    > Of course, but asking someone to spend a lot of hours on this in a week, with no guarantee of a job at the end of it is not a direction this industry needs to go I have never seen this from any serious employers. If someone is asking you to do this, then go work somewhere else. Employers are expecting that you learn on the job.

herpderperator 6y ago

I love rails, but despite its presense for over a decade, it doesn't feel mature. Something as basic as a native left join in ActiveRecord wasn't added until Rails 5.0, on June 30, 2016. Something as basic as native multiple database support wasn't released until Rails 6.0, on August 16, 2019, 15 years after its initial release... These are just two examples.

joevandyk 6y ago
I've worked with Rails for since 2005, I've never needed those features yet.
tyre 6y ago
Multi-database support is not "basic". At what point do you need that? What percentage of users do? Regardless, it was fully supported in gems for years before it went into Rails. It's nice to have it in core. But to say that Rails doesn't feel mature without it? Come on.
- zbentley 6y ago
  > At what point do you need that? What percentage of users do? In my experience, rather a lot.
  - obiefernandez 6y ago
    If you need to connect to multiple databases at a time for your business logic then you're doing it wrong.
    - zbentley 6y ago
      ...are you serious? Virtually every software shop I've worked at has had most backend code communicating with multiple databases to get the job done. Sometimes those databases were behind [micro]service abstractions and the communication was indirected by RPC/one-way async dispatch. Sometimes it wasn't. But multiple backend datastores' contents were required for most business operations. The only places I've worked with that didn't need that were very, very small (single digits of thousands or fewer users).

mudlus 6y ago

Now that Rails has StimuluseReflex / ActionCable (which is kind of an additional learning curve), it's got some incredible potential. I was skeptical of WebPacker at first, too, but also have grown to love it.

andrei_says_ 6y ago
Love it, just don’t touch it ;)

e12e 6y ago

> is there a version manager I should be using? > I am familiar with nvm and pyenv for managing Node and Python versions, respectively, however the tutorial I was following did not mention any Ruby version manager. I took to the internet and found the highly popular, rbenv. If you want "just" a version manager for ruby, I'd go with rbenv. But if you use, say, node and python too - I'd go with asdf: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-ruby https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-ruby Keeps the stampede of VMs out of your bashrc.

richjdsmith 6y ago
I've since moved my ruby projects over to asdf for its simplicity, and the fact that you're going to be stuck using something to manage node anyways.
donw 6y ago
That's a great share! Didn't know about `asdf`, and not having to load ~4 different language version managers is a solid win. It also looks like `asdf` Does The Right Thing and uses shims, unlike `rvm`, which, as of the last time I checked, overrides shell builtins, which is a straight-up WTF where I come from.
jbverschoor 6y ago
I’m still on rbebv amnbs clones like nodenv.

wholien 6y ago

On an "attitude" level, it's very useful to understand the doctrine of Ruby on Rails (RoR), as written by DHH [1]. Especially if you're coming from some other paradigms / languages etc., RoR can feel quite different. Understanding the philosophy is a nice window to kickstart the "way" of RoR. On a more practical level, I've found the official Ruby on Rails guides [2] to be super helpful. I started a RoR job almost a year ago without having done any Ruby at all (I had a Python background). I probably should have gone through the tutorials in the OP and in other comments (rails tutorial book comes to mind). But since I didn't, I used the RoR guides A LOT. And they were super useful. Everything from routes, to controllers, to ActiveModel and migrations. They give you a good starting point to get most of the job done. Highly recommend looking at the relevant guides if you are working on specific RoR things! 1: https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine/ https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine/ 2: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ https://guides.rubyonrails.org/

leetrout 6y ago

I took a rails job by accident- I knew rails was in use but I was interviewed in Go and talked about new things going on in Go micro services. I didn’t expect 40 hours a week of rails / ember JS work and that’s my fault. I have 12 years with Django and I was shocked there wasn’t the equivalent of the Django tutorial. Everyone says the rails tutorial is good and I’m sure it’s worth the money but no one at work endorsed it (nor provided recommendations for any Ruby / rails tutorials). Coming from Python, Go, JS/Typescript (react, vue, etc) in my most recent experiences it was really rough. I couldn’t understand some of the rails magic and the docs were horrible compared to Django. Ruby Mine IDE was essential. I learned how much I love DDL management via code (Django ORM or SQL Alchemy) and how active record did just enough to fool you (which is common in other ORMs). In the end I left the job for a full time Go position and I’ve missed Rspec every day. The rails (or Ruby in general) toolset really impressed me and I’m using Ginkgo at my current job to get my fix for BDD / specs.

donw 6y ago
> The rails (or Ruby in general) toolset really impressed me and I’m using Ginkgo at my current job to get my fix for BDD / specs. This is, I suspect, the biggest win from the Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Rubyland went hard-core TDD a long while back -- I suspect largely due to the influence of Pivotal Labs -- and the maturity of the toolset and automation really reflects that. Every time I work in another language, I find myself very much missing both the Ruby toolchain and (depending on the language) the everything-is-an-object approach. Not to say that Ruby is perfect, but the tooling really is that good, which is pretty amazing given that Ruby isn't exactly the most parseable of languages -- although on that front, I've got a lot of hope for Crystal: https://crystal-lang.org https://crystal-lang.org
ritchiea 6y ago
It’s really surprisingly difficult to jump between Python and Ruby. And Rails and Django. They are just similar enough that you think the switch shouldn’t be so tough but all the differences really bite you. Whereas jumping into a completely different ecosystem like JS or Go you don’t have the part of your brain telling you “this isn’t that different, you’ll be fine, look for something familiar.”

quest88 6y ago

I love rails. I want to build products and not muck with tech stacks. Rails and the ecosystem make it easy.

czbond 6y ago
This is my view. I'm a CompSci person who hates mucking in the toolsets and language peculiarities of stacks, but loves product ;) I have never been able to be more 'meta' in product than I have felt with Ruby/Rails.

nlh 6y ago

> Blocks are one of the most confusing, yet most powerful elements of Ruby. They allow you to group expressions, save them to a variable, and even pass them to a method. I’m still getting used to blocks and realizing their usefulness, but overall I feel that they condense a lot of code, and also make code more reusable and extensible. Agreed re: confusion! I've been using Ruby (and Crystal) for years and I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that while I fully understand how to _use_ blocks, I haven't really truly grokked them. I kinda use them and use yield and it all works. But! Something clicked recently, and I'm not sure why it took so long (maybe it was lots more experience with JavaScript lately?) and I feel kinda dumb that I just realized this: Blocks are just anonymous functions. That's it. Yield just means "call the anonymous function that was passed in". Yield with arguments (which always confused the hell out of me) is, again, just calling that same anonymous function with arguments. (I think?)

danmaz74 6y ago
What ruby blocks have in common with js anonymous functions is that they are closures, so that might be what made them click when you learned about those.
jes5199 6y ago
yes, exactly! Anonymous functions weren't as common in other languages when Ruby first got popular, so the older Ruby devs had to learn about blocks without talking about anonymous functions, and I think they mostly haven't realized that the world has changed and there's a common terminology that people coming in from other languages will know. The one big quirk is that Ruby syntax doesn't let you assign a block to a variable like you can assign a function to a variable in javascript. But you can work around that by using the lambda keyword or Proc.new with a block, which will wrap it into an object. Then you can use the & sigil to pass that object into a method that's expecting a block
topher6345 6y ago
> Blocks are just anonymous functions. That's it. Blocks in ruby have non-local return, unlike anonymous functions. compare `[1,2,3].map {|e| return true if e > 1 }` in ruby to `[1,2,3].map(e => {if(e > 1) { return true}})` in javascript. The ruby version will return a single `true` value, while the javascript version will return an array. This post walks through a example that resembles my experience writing bugs when I knew way more ruby than javascript: https://github.com/raganwald-deprecated/homoiconic/blob/master/2010/04/blocks.md https://github.com/raganwald-deprecated/homoiconic/blob/mast...

cambalache 6y ago

I am one of those obnoxious people who is trying all the time new web technologies, without deepening the skill for years in just one. Out all the frameworks I have used (Django,Phoenix,Node/Express in all its flavors,.NET Core, Echo) Rails is by far the one in which I feel more productive. Ruby is a lovely language, the ecosystem is mature, there is always a gem for everything and for the kind of applications I do (just 1-3 developers) Rails suits the needs perfectly. All the rest have been very solid and enjoyable frameworks (except for the Node-based ones, sorry) but I still prefer Rails.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
Just curious why the (negative) callout for Node-based frameworks like express? How, technically, were they inferior to Ruby (or any of the other languages you listed)?
- cambalache 6y ago
  I like Javascript and Express, so in that sense they are OK. I hate the brittleness of the ecosystem, the "flavor of the month" character, and the explosion of options, there are people who like that setup: small programs that you can plug and play to create your whole stack, I find that tiresome, I prefer big monoliths in which the best options and practices are universally agreed upon. Ah and I hate Typescript, nice idea, but when you spend 30% of your time looking after all those custom types and end up using an ":any" hack to make it work, this leaves a bad taste in your mouth. If I am going to use strong types I would choose an actual strongly-typed language for that, C# is great.
  - halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
    Somewhat ironic but not sure if you know, Typescript is made by Microsoft and the lead Typescript language architect is Anders Hejlsberg who also was heavily involved in the creation and architecture of C#.
    - AlchemistCamp 6y ago

lubesGordi 6y ago

I'm a back end C++/rust type and I script with Python. If I wanted to build a front end, is there any reason I'd use Ruby/Rails over Django? I'm not familiar with Rails but I'm curious if it's worthwhile to pick up.

yazmeya 6y ago
The neat thing about Rails is that going from zero to a running database-backed app is done in a ridiculously few number of keystrokes that invoke quite a bit of under-the-hood magic in terms of routing, form and view scaffolding, etc. Django is kind of similar, in that you don't need to write a ton of code to get a basic app in the browser, but it exposes a bit more of itself as you get going right away, and you need to work a bit connecting things together. As far as mature, large Django and Rails apps – the similarities outweigh the differences, in my opinion. I would recommend doing the basic Rails tutorial, it really doesn't take that much time.
valzam 6y ago
Unless you are interested in learning ruby or have some specific gripes with how django does things (it is very opinionated) I would say no.
amw-zero 6y ago
All web frameworks are equivalent.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
Rails is a bit more productive. Being a slightly more-expressive language, Ruby has a considerable edge when it comes to DSLs. Whether it's worth it for you to learn or not depends on how quickly you can pick it up and how important the web app part is to you. Edit: Why is yazmeya's sibling comment flagged? It's not a glib one-liner and it's clearly an attempt to be helpful.
burlesona 6y ago
I wouldn't recommend Rails as front-end only. It's fine as a full-stack framework, and rather nice for quickly building out a back-end API, but not really compelling if you're only using the front-end side of things IMO. That said, I would argue that Ruby is a very similar but nicer scripting language than Python (particularly for general utility / glue scripts), so if you enjoy scripting in Python you would probably find Ruby easy to pick up and potentially a nice compliment to what you already know.

dstorm1 6y ago

Is it just me or is Rails really complex? Its abstractions are so far removed from anything familiar (HTTP, SQL) that its difficult to understand what is happening unless you deeply understand the framework.

burlesona 6y ago
Rails is somewhat complex, but it's a weird kind of complexity. In some ways it is like React: it's almost easier if you learn it first, before you know what it's doing under the hood, so you're not asking yourself "how" all the time. The good thing about Rails is it's very well-documented, and if you just work your way through the entire Rails guide or the Rails Tutorial, by the end it all clicks together and makes a lot of sense, and from there on it becomes really easy.
chowned 6y ago
The point is to rely on the abstractions. :) I get similar feelings, especially having been burned by software in the past that purported to abstract things properly. But perhaps unlike other frameworks/libraries, I think Rails has solid abstractions. Of course they're not perfect, but much like abstractions provided by an OS, they are complex, and you mostly don't have to worry about implementation details. (And when you do, that's okay, because the documentation is solid too and the code is available.) I've been working with Django lately and I definitely had to learn to let go and trust stuff like the ORM. But after watching migrations get handled automatically and easily adding foreign key relationships to tables, I was hooked. I used to be firmly in the "almost never ORM" camp, but that's changed.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
The whole thing centers on ActiveRecord. Understand that, and you're basically done. Be warned, though. Once you do, you'll never want to go back to any other ORM's.

yters 6y ago

ruby coders always seem so happy closest i can think of is clojure coders, they also seem quite pleased

moralsupply 6y ago

Ruby on Rails: learn in a week, spend 4 years dealing with the mess you've created. Then jump to Clojure and start again...

wwright 6y ago

This seems like an incredibly presumptive and onerous process to expect an interviewee to go through.

codetheory 6y ago

Lack of a lot negative comments on this post is surprising

burlesona 6y ago
The "current hotness" always gets praise, while the penultimate hotness gets piles of scorn. I think the JS ecosystem is fading in hotness - not sure exactly where everyone is going, but Go, Rust, and Python all seem pretty hot these days, so we'll see. Regardless, that means Ruby/Rails is no longer the penultimate hotness, it's merely a boring old technology that does what it does. And it turns out, Ruby is a lovely language (with its flaws), and Rails is a useful and impressively productive framework (which has cast a long shadow on the entire web development world). So I think the narrative is warming back up.
confidantlake 6y ago
I have found the rails community to be fairly positive.

jaredcwhite 6y ago

I hesitate to state that Ruby is making a comeback, because I don't think it ever really faded (isrubydead.com ;-) )…but it definitely feels like the momentum is picking up. 2021 is going to be amazing. Ruby 3. Rails 6.1+ along with new HEY-derived innovations. ViewComponent + StimulusReflex is quickly becoming a powerhouse combo. A ton of useful gems coming out all the time. I myself am furiously working on making Bridgetown one of the world's great static site generators. Honestly, there's never been a better time to be a Rubyist than right now.

afhammad 6y ago
The market (job vacancies) seem to imply otherwise, I rarely see it mentioned in comparison to Python, Go, PHP.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  At least in the U.S there are more Ruby jobs than PHP, so what you're saying isn't accurate. In Europe (outside UK) Ruby is weaker I agree; php/.net seem to be way more popular.
  - afhammad 6y ago
    Yeh, i'm going off London job market.
    - joelbluminator 6y ago
      Hmm what do you base that on? I'm genuinely curious. Looking at Linkedin I see a lot of Ruby jobs in London, some in really top notch companies. To me London seems like a great place to be a Rubyist. Just for comparison's sake this is from Linkedin (London Metrpoloitan): Ruby: 1238 Node: 1940 PHP: 1332 Rust: 157 Python: 9208 Golang: 588 (might be called Go in many jobs though) Conclusion: Ruby on par with php, less popular than Node but not by orders of magnitute, and used way less than Python. But comparing it to web development languages like PHP/Node, it's right there with them. If anything Ruby is in bad form in mainland Europe (France, Germany, Netherlands) where for whatever reason PHP is king for startups. Now for frameworks: Rails: 480 Laravel: 41 Django: 535 Symfony: 164 Conclusion: Rails is really up there with any other major framework. Could be that some job posts don't mention the framework, but I'm going with the data we have. Some famous Ruby shops I know are from London: Deliveroo, GoCardless, Funding Circle, Babylon Health. I honestly don't see how this is bad.

codecutter 6y ago

I recently started learning Ruby on Rails about 3 months ago. I had zero knowledge about any web programming. HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript is all new to me. Using Ubuntu was also foreign to me, but I tried. I started watching videos on YouTube, especially from Traversy Media. Then I joined a few courses on Udemy. Reading books was painful, so I started actual working on code. I am building app to create a portal, giving information about non-profits. (planning to release my rookie code in AGPL license). Having a project in mind really helps. I really liked the simplicity of Rails' structured way, but there is a lot to learn and it gets overwhelming, but it is fun and I like it. It was also motivating to know that I could learn programming at age 53. Heartfelt Thanks to all those unknown faces on the internet who are selflessly helping others like me learn new things. Now I realized, that you are never too old to learn something new. Yes, Ruby on Rails is fun.

SmellTheGlove 6y ago

I won't add any value to this thread, just wanted to say thanks to the folks that piled on with additional learning resources. I've always _meant_ to pick up Ruby at some point, and it feels like there's a lot of great information out there to get started.