You Need to Get Railed.
Throughout the later half of my life I’ve been flirting with programming technologies of one sort or another. HTML, JAVA, CSS, PHP, Applescript, and various proprietary scripting languages. Never, though, have I really felt that I could do anything really useful with any of these languages. I just didn’t have the head for programming, and it took too much coding before I could even get anything like a base that I could work from; a working model to tweak and configure. I’ve built some ok websites, and know enough Applescript to get stuff done that I need to, but beyond that I’ve always been very intimidated by programming.
Then I decided to take a look at Ruby on Rails. I had heard good things about Ruby, and I picked up Learn to Program by Chris Pine, which is an introduction to programming in Ruby. Compared to my CS 160 flirtation with JAVA during my freshman year (the class that ultimately led me to spurn CS in favor of Anthropology) Ruby was much more elegant, and required less headache to do simple tasks. Having decided that Ruby was actually approachable, I looked into Rails.
Rails is (as I understand it at this early point) an extension of Ruby that focuses on developing dynamic database-driven web apps. The kicker is that it does a LOT of the setup work for you, provided you can live with adhering to some simple naming and structure conventions. Within 15 minutes you can have a simple web app up and running. It does this by making a few basic assumptions about what you want to accomplish. You have a database, with tables, and in these tables you want to create, edit, and delete elements. Create the database, making sure you name it right, and add a table with some fields, then tell Rails to build the scaffold around that ( a one line terminal command). Presto! You have the basic structure from which to build off of.
I’m only at the point where I’ve been following in some online tutorials, but the ease with which one can create something that is actually functional is a big kicker for me. I don’t want to have to code for days on end in several programming languages just to be able to get to what I would consider a starting point.
