Saturday, December 16, 2006

Great Time To Ride the Rails!

Believe it or not, my Rails journey started with a Linux Auditor Live DVD. On that DVD was the open-source exploit framework Metasploit which was written in Perl at the time. Curious, I visited the site, read through the documentation, and found out that the whole project was being redone in Ruby.

What struck me about the developer's documentation was how easy it was to read. The code read pretty much like a book and I could visually and conceptually link everything together in my mind.

Ruby code sure was clear.

So then I decided to go browsing at my local Barnes & Nobles for some books to further fuel the fire. After flipping through the very limited selection (at the time) of Ruby books, I came home with Agile Web Development with Rails and Ruby For Rails. What followed afterwards was a blur.

Literally within the same day I had a database-backed web site where I could create a blog or shopping cart and keep orders and transactions. Even though they were both VERY rough and in development mode, it said a lot for someone like me who had mostly front end web design experience. The process got me psyched and made me want to learn more Ruby and Rails.



Ruby For You (and me)!


Since then I've participated in and joined the NY Ruby Brigade and I'm also very proud to be a part of the New Jersey Ruby Group. After much coding and researching and learning and studying, I've realized something . . .

My mind is having trouble keeping up with my passion for learning everything (as corny as that sounds)! Quite literally, I think the biggest problem I'm having right now is that there aren't enough hours in the day. Plus, for some weird reason, we have to sleep.

Well, being that I'm no superman, I obviously forget. Or, there are times while I'm coding that I just can't seem to recall a certain method, or regex, or what relationship to put in my models.



Mission Statement


This [blog] will be my savior. My martial arts instructor used to tell us to keep a fighter's journal of all the techniques and philosophy we absorb during our time training, because there is such a wealth of information to be absorbed. The same applies to learning Ruby, and that is where the intention of all the future blog articles will lie:

This blog is mainly for you and me. For me, it's a record of all my do's and don'ts, heartaches and joys of learning and programming in Ruby. For you, it's a chance for any Ruby or Rails or even coding newbie to join forces with me, still a relative newbie, in the fast growing world of Ruby and Rails development.

For many of you, you have just heard of this Rails thing. Or maybe you are one of the few like me who had just stumbled upon some Ruby code and would like to see some more. Let me tell you something - it's an awesome time to be a Ruby n00b.

I will make it my job to make sure your journey through learning Ruby will not only be one of the most rewarding experiences but also fun.

Welcome to the world of Ruby / Rails n00bness, we're all in this together!!!

Feel free to comment me with questions. I frequent the #nyc.rb, #rubyonrails, and #ruby-lang channels on irc.freenode.net under the nickname hookET. Looking forward to hearing from y'all!

Next up . . . getting a vanilla installation of Ruby on Rails onto your system!

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