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

Hey doktrin - thanks for sharing your perspective! I did see that notice on Devise's documentation. I think Hartl's Rails Tutorial will go through a more basic user auth process. If you think Rails is a poor first choice - what's your recommended language and why?

doktrin 14y ago
>If you think Rails is a poor first choice - what's your recommended language and why? At the risk of being a little pedantic, I think Ruby is a great choice (Rails being a web framework). Sinatra is much more lightweight Ruby framework that I personally think is more appropriate when starting out. It offers far fewer abstractions (or, "magic") and is a radically simpler beast. To put some numbers on that assertion, the codebase itself is less than 1/100th the size of Rails. If working with a different language, I recommend starting with some similar level of abstraction. Sinatra-esque frameworks typically offer enough functionality to make development fun while not obfuscating too much of the logic. Spark (Java) is Sinatra inspired. While I've never seriously developed in Python, web.py has been on my to-use list for quite some time.
- jasonshen 14y ago
  No worries - you're right, I should have said framework. Will look into Sinatra!
  - scottmagdalein 14y ago
    Hey Jason, I'm a learner just like you and have only been working with Ruby for about 8 months. I'm a Treehouse customer and mix those video courses with Codecademy for reinforcement. I started trying to learn Rails at the same time that I was learning Ruby. That was a bad choice and I gave up after a couple months. When I started back at it recently, I dove straight into Ruby alone and left the frameworks out of it. After I felt comfortable enough in Ruby, I added Sinatra and love it. Rails is powerful, but Sinatra is "just enough" for beginners like us.
bdcravens 14y ago
Learn something that requires you to write all the code as your first language (like PHP without a framework), and then Rails as your second "language". Only after writing SQL do you truly realize the power of Active Record, or write session-based authentication do you appreciate Devise. I love Rails's "magic", but I like that I can visualize what a Gem is doing based on how similar functionality would be implemented in PHP or ColdFusion.

doktrin 14y ago

>If you think Rails is a poor first choice - what's your recommended language and why? At the risk of being a little pedantic, I think Ruby is a great choice (Rails being a web framework). Sinatra is much more lightweight Ruby framework that I personally think is more appropriate when starting out. It offers far fewer abstractions (or, "magic") and is a radically simpler beast. To put some numbers on that assertion, the codebase itself is less than 1/100th the size of Rails. If working with a different language, I recommend starting with some similar level of abstraction. Sinatra-esque frameworks typically offer enough functionality to make development fun while not obfuscating too much of the logic. Spark (Java) is Sinatra inspired. While I've never seriously developed in Python, web.py has been on my to-use list for quite some time.

jasonshen 14y ago
No worries - you're right, I should have said framework. Will look into Sinatra!
- scottmagdalein 14y ago
  Hey Jason, I'm a learner just like you and have only been working with Ruby for about 8 months. I'm a Treehouse customer and mix those video courses with Codecademy for reinforcement. I started trying to learn Rails at the same time that I was learning Ruby. That was a bad choice and I gave up after a couple months. When I started back at it recently, I dove straight into Ruby alone and left the frameworks out of it. After I felt comfortable enough in Ruby, I added Sinatra and love it. Rails is powerful, but Sinatra is "just enough" for beginners like us.

bdcravens 14y ago

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