Buy the book instead

There was a digg last night on the top 12 Rails tutorials. All there in a nice neat overview. As I blogged before, according to me, these tutorials don’t work. You should buy the book instead.

I spent countless nights and airport trips reading ‘the book’. I made annotations all over the book. Read chapters over and over again. Even now, after some 12 months, I still refer to the book every few days or so. It is never more than 1 meter away from where I’m coding.

I was in some kind of distress when I learned that using physical books was so 1990′s and that annotations I scribbled all over are difficult to upgrade. So … I came to this conclusion: I am probably doing 60-70% of the things wrong or sub-optimal. By browsing the book, I often read paragraphs that I forgot about. So I will buy a new version of the same book, re-read it all over again so I am sure I will make less ‘mistakes’.

So, don’t do the tutorials, buy the book and consider buying the book again in 12 months or so to re-read it.

What rails did and python didn’t do (for me)

Yes, a demo application is up and running. It’s a simple 5table db for a flower shop with search and index function. Nicely integrated with 6 static html pages. As usual when switching environments (this time from my cosy laptop, to the big cruel world of RailsHosting providers) it took more time than hoped (hope is an expensive emotion). My first problem was getting this mySQL database up and running. The thing always bothers me about passwords and users and privileges. There is something there i still not understand. But my biggest problem was getting from dispatch.cgi to dispatch.fcgi. Mind you, this was the first time I did some production work on linux systems. But now it is there, the customer has seen it and tonight I visit the customer to discuss new features. I will actually charge some money for it. So my investment (the price of the book I bought) will have paid off.

I have compared this to a similar experience with Python 2 years ago. I had the same adventure style idea of replacing all the bloatware .net development mega stuff by this simple and elegant framework. I programmed about 6 months in python. It is sure a very elegant language and framework, the support & libraries available on the internet fantastic. However, it never passed the ‘can I go live with this thing’ test. For some reason, it lacked that production feel. Now, this is a very personal view, but some may understand what I mean.

The rails thing was different, I only bought one book and about 1/3th of that book deals with scaling, going live, tuning, selecting webservers, migrating to new versions, protecting against injection and so on. It offered the complete shebang, AND IT WORKS.

Is rails p0rn0graphy?

I have used zeros in stead of letters ‘o’ in the title above, just to make sure I am not getting kicked out by some child protection scheme. Why am I writing this title…

For the first time, I am starting to consider if I should not push to get my_big_company_bloated_software_product v2 version done in rails. How much more elegant that would be?

What could stop it?

SCALEBILITY

the people at 37signals area running 5 aps for 400.000 users on 13 servers. Even if they exagerate a 100 times (my users are a bit more frequent users that the average 37signals registered user) I figured out that is about 400 users/server. Surprise surprise, that is exactly the number we have reached, after 8 weeks of intense scaling effort. (We got IIS out of memory at 113 users)

KNOWLEDGE

If I can figure it while waiting in airports, most younger people should be able to figure it out after 3 weeks.

SO WHY NOT DO IT

Well, this thing is so ‘off limits’ you could consider it like p0rn. I ordered my book on my home address, i wouldn’t want any on my managers see what I am up to. “why don’t you spend your time writing specs for version 32.89″ I hear them say. I take great care in explaining some of the things I have learned, so people of my day job, are not realizing I am writing this new killer app.

It’s like this post, about if rails would ever become mainstream. The answer was as neat as rails itself: we wouldn’t want to…

RAILS TUTORIALS DON’T WORK

Please everyone, FORGET ABOUT THE TUTORIALS ! They don’t work. Not even the ‘4 days on rails‘. At best they give you a glimpse of what is possible, but don’t for a minute assume you will be taking your first steps to learn the framework, let alone the language.

This Rails/Ruby thing is soooo big and soooo deep, you can’t possibly think you can ‘learn’ anything from a 4day, let alone a 30min intro.

Instead buy the books, only when I was about 1/3 through “Agile Web Development with Rails”, I started to consider making some applications. Finally I could start to understand what all this weird syntax and hocus pocus was about.

I think I may have done that out of frustration. I am probably not that intelligent that I understand it all at once. I took me ages to realy understand the rails model view controller, and where was what. I am still not quite sure how the controller bit relates to urls and pages and structure… I guess I’ll get that when I have developed my 4th app.

So I took once step back, no I took 2 steps back. I decided that I needed to understand Ruby before understanding Rails. I am not sure that that was the right thing. I have seen people delving in rails from day 1 and finding out the neat ruby tricks as they went along.

So after the few weeks restling at night with Ruby, my amazon order arrived with the shiny new rails book. Boy oh boy, how stupid I have been. Now things finally fell into place, there was some realy intelligent thinking in this thing. And above all it works.

So, if you ask me, spend time to decide on whether you want to go into rails or not using the tutorials. But they are like the shiny new sales brochure of the Formula 1 car in your local car dealer. Don’t think you can drive the beast just from looking at the brochure, use the brochure to decide if you are going to take the driving lessons or not. See you on the Formula 1 rails track. (argh, i have killed you with this one…)