I’m Learning Ruby On Rails Because I’m Weak-Willed And Stupid

By: John Elder

Well, I’ve done it…I’ve finally folded to peer pressure and decided to learn the Ruby programming language and…Rails too…I suppose.

I’ve railed (no pun intended) against it for a few years now simply because I’m absolutely positive that it’s just a fad.

Every time I’ve taken a look – I’ve decided that there’s no earthly reason for me to bother learning it. I can’t find a single legitimate reason to use Ruby…except that its the hottest language at the moment that commands the highest salaries.

It seems to me that I can do everything Ruby does with PHP and MySQL, and possibly a little javascript here and there…much quicker and easier than by deploying some massive Rails project. But whatever. I’m a little under the weather and taking a break for a day or two, so I’ve got nothing else to do…

How I’m Learning Ruby:

There’s tons of ways to learn any programming language. Usually I just read some tutorials online and then start banging around and building things till I get the hang of it. But this time I decided to enroll in the new codecademy.com Ruby class.

It’s totally online, interactive, and “go at your own pace” which is nice because I can blow through it quickly.

I’ve played around with codecademy’s stuff before and found it to be a little too simplistic and too easy for my taste. But frankly, I don’t want to put a lot of effort into this so codecademy seems like the way to go.

There’s also a coursera ruby class that I hear is good, but that seems like more effort that I’m willing to put into this.

I just started an hour or so ago and I’m already 70% done with the class. So far I haven’t discovered any reason to use Ruby, but it’s admittedly early days. (EDIT: a couple hours later I finished the entire course)

We’ll see how it goes.

What about you? Have you recently learned Ruby? Have you found it to be worth knowing or more of a fad? I’d love to hear your comments…

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3 thoughts on “I’m Learning Ruby On Rails Because I’m Weak-Willed And Stupid

  1. Main reasons to use RoR are that it is a lightning fast platform for developing web applications, the metaprogramming features of Ruby enable very powerful functionality with very few lines of code, and it implements solid design patterns. It is also quite scalable if you make certain adjustments (e.g. switching from ActiveRecord to DataMapper to use a NoSQL DB). There are also excellent testing tools available and a vibrant open source developer community behind it. It’s not a fad, and it is even beating out major competing web frameworks like Python on Django.

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