4 ms·

I think the big difference between now and when Rails was first starting to gain popularity is that now most of the blogs are primarily covering advanced/obscur

I think the big difference between now and when Rails was first starting to gain popularity is that now most of the blogs are primarily covering advanced/obscure topics related to rails. Years ago, most blog posts were about the basics of getting started with rails. Now those old posts no longer apply to the newer version of rails. This is not the fault of rails and it is not the fault of bloggers. There is no shortage of books available to learn rails, but learning a new framework via books is not always the most approachable way for newcomers to learn rails. It would be awesome if someone rebooted some of the older railscasts by Ryan Bates Railscasts for rails 3.1, but that takes a lot of effort and in another year or two the content will again become stale. I would love to see some people blog about the basics of using new versions of rails. Rails has been improving over the years, and I think excellent design decisions have been made. I do not think it is the fault of rails that the author feels that rails is less approachable.

elithrar 15y ago
> I would love to see some people blog about the basics of using new versions of rails. You mean: Rails for Zombies (http://railsforzombies.org/ http://railsforzombies.org/) Michael Hartl's screencasts/tutorial (http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/) Stack Overflow (not a blog, but a really good resource). I think the number of blogs doing Rails 101 type posts has changed, because there are existing resources that do a great job, and developers/bloggers recognise that.
joshwa 15y ago
The pace of Rails development isn't a problem in and of itself, it's that the pace of change and the overall Rails development culture wrecks the documentation ecosystem. Of the top rails documentation resources: * Rails Guides are still out of date and incomplete for 3.x series. I often have to go to the API docs since some big topics just aren't covered in any level of detail. * Railscasts deals exclusively with deltas-- new features, new techniques, etc, and no longer has a nice pedagogical sequence. The original tutorials are just plain out of date. (Maybe the peepcode tutorials are more up-to-date and comprehensive?) * Google. The biggest of all. Rails pace of change and its agnosticism means that the corpus of blog posts with recommendations, bugfixes, tips, tweaks, tutorials, etc, become out of date quickly, and more importantly it's extremely hard to tell what version of rails or of a plugin a given post or thread is referring to. A secondary issue: Rails newfound agnosticism (compared to its previous "opinionated" nature), along with the culture of the "flavor of the week" creates problems in the development and documentation ecosystem: * The plugin ecosystem: the "flexibility" of rack means that there are so many plugin options it's blinding, and the flavor of the week changes so often that it's hard to know if you're on a dead-end track or not. * Google: the same issue with Rails core changes applies manyfold to the development ecosystem: blog posts, stackoverflow threads, forums, etc are quickly obsolete and it's difficult to determine staleness and whether the recommendations are pointing to a development dead-end where the project is no longer under active development. The panoply of options and the chaotic development ecosystem can equally be attributed to Rails' newfound agnosticism, the development culture that engenders, and that chaos multiplied by the huge popularity of Rails makes navigating and getting things done difficult. It's my experience that Rails involves a lot more yak-shaving than it used to due to the issues above. I kind of wish there were a more conservative Rails community/blog/resource that issued recommendations and documentation/tutorials about a more stable way of doing Rails, making sure that the surrounding ecosystem is more stable and has less entropy than the community at large.

elithrar 15y ago

> I would love to see some people blog about the basics of using new versions of rails. You mean: Rails for Zombies (http://railsforzombies.org/ http://railsforzombies.org/) Michael Hartl's screencasts/tutorial (http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/) Stack Overflow (not a blog, but a really good resource). I think the number of blogs doing Rails 101 type posts has changed, because there are existing resources that do a great job, and developers/bloggers recognise that.

joshwa 15y ago

The pace of Rails development isn't a problem in and of itself, it's that the pace of change and the overall Rails development culture wrecks the documentation ecosystem. Of the top rails documentation resources: * Rails Guides are still out of date and incomplete for 3.x series. I often have to go to the API docs since some big topics just aren't covered in any level of detail. * Railscasts deals exclusively with deltas-- new features, new techniques, etc, and no longer has a nice pedagogical sequence. The original tutorials are just plain out of date. (Maybe the peepcode tutorials are more up-to-date and comprehensive?) * Google. The biggest of all. Rails pace of change and its agnosticism means that the corpus of blog posts with recommendations, bugfixes, tips, tweaks, tutorials, etc, become out of date quickly, and more importantly it's extremely hard to tell what version of rails or of a plugin a given post or thread is referring to. A secondary issue: Rails newfound agnosticism (compared to its previous "opinionated" nature), along with the culture of the "flavor of the week" creates problems in the development and documentation ecosystem: * The plugin ecosystem: the "flexibility" of rack means that there are so many plugin options it's blinding, and the flavor of the week changes so often that it's hard to know if you're on a dead-end track or not. * Google: the same issue with Rails core changes applies manyfold to the development ecosystem: blog posts, stackoverflow threads, forums, etc are quickly obsolete and it's difficult to determine staleness and whether the recommendations are pointing to a development dead-end where the project is no longer under active development. The panoply of options and the chaotic development ecosystem can equally be attributed to Rails' newfound agnosticism, the development culture that engenders, and that chaos multiplied by the huge popularity of Rails makes navigating and getting things done difficult. It's my experience that Rails involves a lot more yak-shaving than it used to due to the issues above. I kind of wish there were a more conservative Rails community/blog/resource that issued recommendations and documentation/tutorials about a more stable way of doing Rails, making sure that the surrounding ecosystem is more stable and has less entropy than the community at large.