New Ruby on Rails Tutorial book-in-progress | Hacker News Reader

New Ruby on Rails Tutorial book-in-progress

railstutorial.org

66 pointsmhartl19 comments

Previously, [Michael] taught theoretical and computational physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for six years, where he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000. Michael is a graduate of Harvard College, has a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech, and is an alumnus of the Y Combinator program.

man, I guess my stereotype that it's mostly non-academic programmers who wouldn't know a heap from a hash-table which are drawn to web-dev is a little out of date...

I like how you introduce the concepts of git and Heroku as well (I haven't looked closely at the actual contents).

How the hard part: making sure the book the book can keep up with the pace at which the Ruby & Rails community moves.

Good work!

Here's the plan:

  $ git commit -am "Updated the tutorial for the latest Rails version"
  $ git push heroku

:-)

As a guy with a systems programming background, I just love how pragmatic the rails community and its texts are.

The book I'm going through now includes a chapter on behaviour driven development, an appendix with a crash course in ruby and another appendix with a crash course in DB design.

I love the ethos of giving you the 80% you'll need frequently and then telling you where to go find the rest. It's making learning web app development so much easier.

Rails guys seem to love getting going fast and it makes it so much more compelling to learn.

Definitely going to be working through this. Looks like it's hitting the topics I want to hear about as I learn RoR. Thanks!

Just worked through the first two sections, really enjoying the balance between 'learning' and 'doing' so far.

Looks like a great start, Michael!

Thanks!

Really like Michael's clear writing style (remember reading Railsspace back in 07). Thx for this new resource.

Also like the fact that he doesn't use many gems, but discusses building stuff from scratch (regarding Railsspace book).

Thanks! Ruby on Rails Tutorial follows the same basic philosophy as RailsSpace, including its treatment of gems. See, e.g., my comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=986514.

e.g. I fondly recall the use of the 'Haversine formula' (calc. distance on a sphere with given lat, lng) built in SQL, instead of using one of the available Geo ruby libraries/ gems (although I'm not sure, if those gems were available back in 07).

Dude, I would totally use a library today! But it was fun busting out a little spherical trigonometry for a Rails book. :-)

This is definitely the best rails tutorial I've seen. Congrats Michael. Awesome job!

nice..would it be rude to ask if/when you plan on putting out something for Rails 3?

You mean like having a separate Git branch for a Rails 3 version of the tutorial? I'd have to be pretty on-the-ball to have thought of that. ;-)

You have a beautifully structured online book. Thanks for making it. Using git to be able to easily compare v2.3.5 code samples to 3.0 could be an amazing resource.

You're welcome! I plan to design around version differences for the most part; by sticking to core principles, I hope to steer clear of needing big tutorial changes from version to version. Rails 3 changes a ton of things, but it's almost all under the hood; plugin developers will have a new API to learn, but most changes should be invisible to application devs. It may be a pipe dream, though; I'll let you know how it goes. :-)

Looks really good so far.

Do you plan on using gems, or building everything from scratch?

I'm focusing on building things from scratch when possible, but I'll definitely use gems when they fill a need. For example, all the user signup machinery will be built from scratch so that readers understand all the different moving parts, but when filling the database with sample data I'll probably use the Faker and Populator gems.

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