Ruby and Rails Take Time, but Reward You Well

I’m still stuck on Ruby and Rails. In a good way and a bad way!
The good way: both are fascinating and incredibly clever.
The bad way: there is much to learn and time is always scarce.

I’m finding myself juggling between many books; the Pickaxe book of course, but sometimes it gets boring, so I go back to learning about Rails, via alternatively Ruby for Rails or Agile Web Development for Rails (the only bad thing about this book is the length of the title). Occasionally, I browse through the Ruby Cookbook, just to passively absorb tidbits.

Of course and language and framework together or independently represent a lot of stuff to absorb. Ruby is just different enough, that there is a lot of learning that seems like re-learning. But it’s always good stuff, simpler, more concise and more powerful constructs than what you would normally do in other languages. The trouble is that all that C-style stuff of other languages can basically be done with Ruby but isn’t good Ruby, so it is important to let go of some of it.

Rails and Ruby do go hand in hand together well. Rails is super clever because of the way it implements something called ORM (Object Relational Mapping). What’s that? In English it means a framework for using relational database with an object oriented language. It just so happens that the way it’s done in Rails really does make good sense and really is a result of the way things are done in Ruby.

The truth is, there isn’t anything actually magical happening in either Ruby or Rails. It just feels magical because of how well things work together for the programmer. Rails’ database migrations make creating and altering database structure pretty simple and painless, but it is still important to understand your database both on its own and in relation to your Rails app and Ruby. That does mean that it is important to learn some SQL stuff (which isn’t painless) but it doesn’t mean you have to master it. Just have a taste of it.