learn ruby on rails

I read part of the first edition of Agile Web Development with Rails, and I built an application that got real (if brief) use. I am going to make sure I keep having Rails-related goals, though, as I really would love to keep learning and using the framework.

I’m building a real application and I’m learning tons of stuff. I’ve worked with several different Java frameworks and most recently with ASP.NET, and I can say that Rails is the best web framework that I’ve seen. I would love to leave Java and .Net behind and use Rails every day at work.

Catching a flight to Chicago today. Will be at RailsConf the rest of the weekend.

I spent the day trying to create my first real Rails app. I’m still a rank newbie and I think I’m probably being overly ambitious, as I’m using the Delicious integration to do some AJAX stuff. I think I ran into just about sticking point possible, but I did learn quite a bit and I came out of it with a working, AJAX-y page.

I’ve been working on a screenscraping application, and I’m using ActiveRecord to save the information I scrape into a database. It’s worked out extremely well, although I had to replace a composite primary key with a single unique id and unique constraint on the old primary key fields.

I highly recommend ActiveRecord as a database access layer, with or without Rails.

Somewhat on the spur of the moment, I went ahead and signed up for RailsConf, which is in June. It felt kinda crazy, since I don’t use Ruby or Rails in my job, but I really feel this is a chance to be way ahead of the technology curve for once.

I’m up to Chapter 9 in Agile Web Development with Rails, and I’ve started my own app based on what I’ve learned.

I’m reading Agile Web Development with Rails, and doing the examples. Very cool. I just finished Chapter 6.