A Locomotive for my rails

So the last week or so I’ve been spending a few hours of commuting time on learning Ruby On Rails. I pretty much followed the steps from my previous post: bought the pdf-version of the book, downloaded Locomotive, and made friends with terminal. So far it’s been a nice experience.

Locomotive really makes it easy to run rails. It has a simple interface (screenshots) and comes with everything installed. Everything except MySQL, which is more or less necessary in order to get going. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty and install it the “proper way”, there is a great set of installers by ServerLogistics which enables you to change settings through system preference panels instead. Besides MySQL, they also provide great packages for Apache 2, PHP and Tomcat. No more fussing about with the command line. Pure bliss!

Anyways, things are going the right way… I’m at chapter nine in the book (the main tutorial is to build an online store), and already it’s dealing with the checkout! I’ve stepped through making a simple admin section for products, a product listing page, and a shopping cart. The code looks amazingly simple and logical, however If I was to try to write any code from scratch I would fail for sure.

Even if I seriously doubt I’m going to be using Ruby On Rails in my work (designer, not programmer), it is a really fun and inspiring way of getting into the Model/View/Controller way of thinking.

Now for some recommended reading (I read a lot better than I write): Amy Hoy has written some really good, insightful and witty articles about Rails and web development in general:

• MVC: The Most Vexing Conundrum
• Rails: what goes where

and there’s always the loud thinking… lately stirring up some debate around Microsofts Ajax framework “Atlas”; arguing about the cleverness of MySQL, and that kindness is the currency of open source support.