

Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails for beginners? - gamechangr

Ruby seems easy, but learning more about these takes time.<p>MVC,
REST,
Migrations,
Database abstraction,
Routing,<p>Is this a good language for beginners?
======
tptacek
Empirically yes. A good fraction of all the enmity the "Rails development
community" attracts is due to the number of Rails programmers who are really
just HTML web site developers who know enough syntax to use ActiveRecord as if
it was MS Access.

Can you figure out MS Access? You'll do fine with Rails.

~~~
gamechangr
I have met a handful of noobs learning RoR and the portrait that you paint is
really accurate. HTML Developers who don't quite have a handle on what is
happening under the hood.

MS Access is easy.

thanks for the post

------
bartonfink
You'll have to deal with all those concepts regardless of language, so it
really doesn't matter. Java, for example, uses all of those concepts in
popular frameworks (Spring, Play, Hibernate) and it's quite a different
language than Ruby. Lots of people make noise about language and frameworks,
but software development is really about abstractions and concepts. If you
know, roughly speaking, what an ORM needs to do, then it's not too much work
to pick up another one if you need to switch to another. Understanding the
concepts is key - the implementations are just window dressing.

~~~
gamechangr
That's quite comforting actually!

------
j2pro
I would suggest reading these two articles:
[http://rob.yurkowski.net/post/17610425880/rails-is-
definitel...](http://rob.yurkowski.net/post/17610425880/rails-is-definitely-
not-for-beginners)

Best way to Learn Ruby & Rails <http://astonj.com/tech/best-way-to-learn-ruby-
rails/>

------
cicloid
TL;DR: <http://interestingman.in/#!/ruby-on-rails-for-beginners>

RoR, or any kind of Web Development requires a big deal of earlier know-how.

Learning How to program is easy, seeing the big picture and how everything
fits together, not so much.

------
jandy
I'm currently teaching a complete beginner how to program. She's interested in
the web, but I was concerned about the breadth of RoR; instead we've gone with
Sinatra, which seems to be much easier to swallow. It's much closer to the
metal, and has considerably less moving parts than RoR.

It's working out pretty well so far.

~~~
korussian
Could you please suggest the best way to get started with Sinatra for a
beginner who just knows HTML/CSS?

Most Sinatra tutorials I've found seem to deal either with very specific
hacker-interest cases ("How to combine Sinatra with x to do y better") or
teach you how to do specific basic stuff and then stop short, promising more
tutorials later.

I'm looking for something that takes me from Part 1 to Part 10, so that I can
really learn to use Sinatra to make cool stuff that average people would like.
Maybe this means one source, or maybe a list of multiple sources in order. It
would be great to get a list like:

1\. Read this 2\. Read that 3\. Try this 4\. Now you can do that 5\. Get
really good at #4, then read this

~~~
gamechangr
I'm facing the same issue. It looks like there are plenty of those "roadmaps"
for Rails, but not much for Sinatra. I think the community assumes a higher
level of learning.

I've started working on Sinatra with friends. Let me know if you land the
information, I couldn't fast enough-so went to people instead of the web.

