

New Ruby on Rails Tutorial book-in-progress - mhartl
http://www.railstutorial.org/

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dschobel
_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out of date...

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bradgessler
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!

~~~
mhartl
Here's the plan:

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

:-)

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

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

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100k
Looks like a great start, Michael!

~~~
mhartl
Thanks!

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christofd
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).

~~~
mhartl
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>.

~~~
christofd
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).

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

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

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

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mhartl
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. ;-)

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jhancock
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.

~~~
mhartl
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. :-)

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steveklabnik
Looks really good so far.

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

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mhartl
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.

