I have heard a lot about the Ruby on Rails web application development framework and decided to give it a try. I feel like I’m getting “back to my roots” by taking on a programming project. It’s been a few years since I code, so I’m ready for a challenge. I picked up APress‘s Beginning Ruby (by Cooper), Beginning Rails (by Hardy and Carneiro), and Ruby On Rails E-Commerce (by Hellstane and Laine) from Barnes and Nobles and have been trying to through it. You don’t hear this often about programming books, but I must say the Beginning Ruby book is quite a good read. I’m trying to get through the beginning rails book as quickly as possible to get to the E-Commerce book, which steps you building an entire online bookstore application.
Rails reminds me of a computer science project my classmates and I worked on as undergrads — creating a model-view-controller (MVC) framework (though I don’t remember using that acronym back then) — and so far the framework is very intuitive. I couldn’t get the scaffolding stuff to work as in the book, however, so I gave up on that (for now) and am moving on. After some web research, seems like the version of rails has changed scaffolding around and now my book is slightly out of date. Oh well. I’ve included some links below in case other people are running into the same problem.
Google group discussion thread on scaffolding issue
Ruby Forum post on scaffolding issue (very useful)
Cool blog I just found: http://iwiwdsmi.blogspot.com/ “This site contains my (Sofeng’s) notes as I learn VxWorks/ Tornado, Emacs, Eclipse, Cygwin, Python, and Django on Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. Feedback or referrals to similar content are welcomed.”
David Mantilla 