New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.(jasimabasheer.com)

155 points by kaiwren 14 years ago | 64 comments

tseabrooks 14 years ago |

I'm in the middle of picking up Ruby primarily because there was a GitHub project I wanted to fork and modify for my purposes that happened to be written in Ruby.The biggest problem I found is that the Ruby (or maybe the Rails?) community by and large provides shit instructions on how to get something running. I checked out a handful of projects and they all said things like, "Just deploy the normal what you deploy a rails app" and the like. Likewise, googling had almost universally bad / outdated information. Eventually I ended up with Passenger who had awesome instructions.

I finally pushed through but I suspect just getting things running is a big enough PITA to deter new people from participating in Ruby land. Even if Hannson says it's a myth.

bradleyland 14 years ago | |

I think the genesis if this problem is due mostly to the fact that programmers from a PHP background are used to not thinking about their server stack. That is changing though.

In languages like PHP, it's possible (again, this is becoming less common) to run an ad-hoc PHP application by simply requesting the URL to the file. For example:

* Drop myapp.php in to your httpd doc root

* Request http://myserver.tld/myapp.php

* Great success!

Rails doesn't work this way at all, and I don't know of an equivalent in the Ruby ecosystem. There is ERB, but no one runs a bare server that just maps myapp.rb to a URL; e.g., http://myserver.tld/myapp.rb. There's always some sort of router in between. Sinatra is probably the most basic Ruby app framework in common use and it still has a router. There are good reasons for this. In Ruby, everything is an object, so if you're writing good Ruby code, you need a way to map URLs to your objects.

Rails is somewhere between Java and mod_php in terms of application infrastructure complexity. The most important distinction is that you have an app server that is separate from your web server, and you have to do, at least, some basic configuration (even with Passenger). Many PHP devs never put any thought in to their server stack. PHP is part of their base Apache install on whatever shared host they're using, and everything "just works".

I'm trying really hard not to paint PHP devs in a bad light. All of this arrises from the circumstances you "grow up" in. There are plenty of PHP stacks that distinguish app worker processes from the web server, so please understand I'm not claiming some kind of superiority. To the contrary, the Ruby community recognizes the complexity penalty taken here, and is making efforts to develop easier ways to jump in to Ruby on Rails development.

This seems like a good topic for a blog post. I might write something up.

tseabrooks 14 years ago | | |

Alternatively, I have almost no web experience and come from an embedded consumer electronics background. Similar problem... :)

anuraj 14 years ago | | |

Are you saying Java deployment is complex? WAR files have been easiest to hot deploy for at least a decade - that too directly from your IDE with the click of a button. PHP deployment simplicity definitely beats everything - and Ruby will come last :(

nascro 14 years ago | |

Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial addresses this right away. The first chapter is called From Zero to Deploy, where he demonstrates how to set up a Ruby/Rails programming environment and deploy rails apps to Github and Heroku.

jboggan 14 years ago | | |

I cannot recommend this enough. Even this lowly darkside Perl hacker was able to make sense of it and use Hartl's example to construct a useful app.

jswanson 14 years ago | | |

Link for Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

Available for free online, though you can also pay for it if you'd like.

rjsamson 14 years ago | |

I've actually found the documentation for projects in the Ruby community, on the whole, to be quite excellent. That being said, I can sympathize with the confusion getting things deployed, if only because there are so many options. The best bet for a beginning, IMHO, is to give Heroku a try when getting your first app deployed - they have some really excellent documentation.

As a beginner, trying to deploying a rails app to production from scratch is likely to drive you a bit crazy.

6ren 14 years ago | | |

I had difficulties getting heroku installed, even though I'm using ubuntu 10.04 LTS (as they are). It took many hours over several days, and several attempts.

One problem is that their deb package doesn't specify ruby as a dependency. Another problem is that you have to examine their inlined bash install script to get to the .deb package to diagnose that. Another problem was that ubuntu's standard package repositories didn't include the version of ruby they needed (ruby1.9.1 - though I just checked now, and it seems to be available again). So I installed rvm, suggested by www.ruby-lang.org as an easy route, which needed me to install a whole bunch of other stuff, and finally installed the latest version of ruby - but this was too recent for their package to accept. sigh Eventually I found an old, undocumented gem of theirs that would install their command-line tool (well, half of it anyway). Maybe it's seamless if you already have ruby installed - but it's a terrible way to start ruby, in my experience anyway. Possibly it's more streamlined on Windows/Mac.

Then... all three versions of ruby that I tried (1.8, 1.9.1, 1.9.3) had changes that broke my tiny toy code. So astonishing, I'm not even mad.

Look at Python, with 5-year support for Python 2 before breaking compatibility with Python 3. And Java, well, I've never heard of code being broken (assert could have, but never heard it happen).

Ruby is labour-intensive - that's the price of constant (incompatible) improvement. Part of that price is documentation that goes out of date, instructions that go out of date, code that goes out of date. It becomes unrealistic to invest in Ruby - unless you plan to be working intensively on it anyway. Which I think does make sense for its original professional users, who are constantly iterating anyway. But it's not good for people who missed the early wave, when ruby was friendly.

It's a shame, because there's a lot of cool ideas in ruby and cool projects using it. I guess that's the trade-off. But, well, it took so much effort to get heroku installed that I haven't used ruby since.

prask7 14 years ago | |

If the project you are dealing with is a Rails project, please go through http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ , it gives simple instructions to get started

Toshio 14 years ago | |

One Rails project that provides pretty thorough installation instructions is this: https://github.com/dserban/censormenot

why-el 14 years ago |

I would like to get some advice from experienced Ruby hackers. Currently I am picking up Ruby through rails, which I am assuming is fairly common. I want to know the downsides to this and what people did to supplement their ruby knowledge beyond Rails. I eventually would like to write my own gems, contribute to open source, and so forth. I am absolutely not satisfied with just consuming Rails.

msluyter 14 years ago |

I really enjoyed working through the Ruby Koans (http://rubykoans.com/). They're especially nice because you can work on them offline, so I finished them while on a flight to the U.K. I'm considering writing up some "advanced ruby koans," with more in depth examples delving deeper into the standard library and whatnot.

danso 14 years ago |

I think it's wrong to judge Zed's Learn Ruby the Hard Way too harshly as the OP does...yes, it's a straight port from the Python version, but both versions focus on teaching programming to non-programmers, which is a concept that can be largely language and idiom agnostic...at least between Python and Ruby.

vidarh 14 years ago |

His summary of the object hierarchy of Ruby is probably more confusing than elucidating to most Ruby beginners, since he doesn't make it very clear that he's dealing with the distinction between instances and classes (which are themselves instances of Class).

From the description it seems like he doesn't quite get the distinction himself, and one of the later examples is broken:

"Array.new.methods - Object.methods" should read "Array.new.methods - Object.new.methods". Otherwise he's in fact subtracting the methods available on an error instance from the methods available on an instance of Class, not the methods available on a generic object..

xentronium 14 years ago | |

> "Array.new.methods - Object.methods" should read "Array.new.methods - Object.new.methods". Otherwise he's in fact subtracting the methods available on an error instance from the methods available on an instance of Class, not the methods available on a generic object..

You are wrong, classes are objects :)

    1.9.3p194 :084 > Object.new.methods - Object.methods
     => []

thenonsequitur 14 years ago | | |

Actually, the author is inaccurate, comparing apples to oranges. Consider the opposite subtraction than you proposed:

    irb(0main):001:0> Object.methods - Object.new.methods
    => [:allocate, :new, ...]

That means doing "Array.new.methods - Object.methods" is subtracting things that may potentially be methods of an Array instance that should not be subtracted. It just so happens to work in this case because Array has none of those methods. But it doesn't work in the general case.

Consider for example, a "Person" class with a single instance method "name". In this case, "Person.new.methods - Object.methods" will not include "name", because this happens to be a method that applies both to Person instances and the object Object. The correct comparison is what vidarh said, "Array.new.methods - Object.new.methods".

The author's main point, however, was that you can write code like "Array.new.methods" and "Object.methods" at all, and that you can write code to subtract them. And this example shows that nicely.

rjsamson 14 years ago |

Its great to see metaprogramming listed here - it is a term that tends to frighten beginners a lot more than it should. Understanding some of the basic metaprogramming concepts and features early will go a long way to helping you become a better Rubyist.

xyzzyb 14 years ago |

Shameless plug: I collected a bunch of resources for learning Ruby, Rails, and general programming on Rake Routes a couple months ago: http://rakeroutes.com/blog/learning-ruby-rails-and-programmi...

On the article, I strongly disagree that vim requires plugins to be viable for Ruby development. The Janus plugin should especially be carefully considered as it wraps up a lot of magic that could prevent the new vim user from effectively learning vim itself.

cicloid 14 years ago |

Also material like Ruby Rogues podcast ( http://rubyrogues.com/ ) contain great episodes to give a newcomer a tour of the ecosystem.

christiangenco 14 years ago |

> (infinite loops are almost always written using the loop do..end construct though. but how often do you write infinite loops anyway?)

`while true` usually does it for me.

snorkel 14 years ago |

Empty string is true. Who here hasn't banged their head over that one?

getsat 14 years ago | |

It's probably better to think "everything that isn't nil or false is true".

xentronium 14 years ago | |

0 is true too. I think that's actually brilliant.

    [1,2,3].index(1)
    # => 0
    [1,2,3].index(4)
    # => nil

sparknlaunch 14 years ago |

Uh, another good post on sharing the joy/pain of learning Ruby. Thanks for sharing.

I have spent the past three weeks getting my head into Ruby (on the hopeful way to understanding Rails). With so many different languages and stacks, it makes the early stages extremely daunting for a beginner.

I have found comfort in the following resources:

1) The only website I found that actually visualized how everything sits together: http://techiferous.com/2010/07/roadmap-for-learning-rails/

2) I persevered with a Ruby programming book: Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (by Peter Cooper)

3) Spent a few days on a zero install Ruby tutorial: http://tryruby.org

I plan to write some blog posts on the journey however may wait until I get passed the basics before sharing too much.

danso 14 years ago | |

Learning Ruby is not the same as learning Rails...

tferris 14 years ago |

OT and hijacking this thread:

1. Who is actually new to Ruby?

(After Ruby or rather the popular RoR is there almost for a decade everyone should have made some experiences with Ruby, so I am wondering if there are many new Rubiest)

2. What new language/stack did you start to learn recently?

(for me: Node.js)

Pewpewarrows 14 years ago | |

As a Python guy I never had any reason to need to learn Ruby. And even now that I'm playing around with it it's purely out of professional curiosity.

verisimilidude 14 years ago | | |

For what it's worth, Ruby has always been more about "want" than "need" for me. When I really need to get something done, fast, I'll choose Python; Python always seems to have an esoteric-but-very-necessary lib for every situation. But Ruby is where I want to spend my fun time.

Opinions will differ, of course. Both languages are tops.

bradleyland 14 years ago | |

> Who is actually new to Ruby?

I suspect your comment is being buried for the pretentiousness of that question. Plenty of people are still new to Ruby, because you absolutely do not need Ruby to have a successful development career. Not to mention the population of individuals who are completely new to programming.

vidarh 14 years ago | |

As a heavy Ruby user who is also regularly hiring:

In my experience it is still vastly harder to hire someone with any degree of Ruby exposure vs. PHP developers, for example.

Ruby is still a niche language.

alexbell 14 years ago | |

That was narrow minded. You know it's possible to be a developer and never touch a web app stack professionally, right? Let alone the One True Language that is Ruby.