To Ruby Or Not To Ruby?

Joe Wikert has kindly sent me a free copy of Beginning Ruby on Rails. Joe challenged me to give the born-again Wrox a try since I’ve been a relentless old-Wrox basher.

In terms of quality of content, Beginning Ruby on Rails is what a n00b book should be. It’s just plain fun. Steven Holzner knows a rooky needs a lot of handholding, so he crawls over every sample in the book explaining how it works.

Beginning Ruby on Rails is what it says it is: a book for total beginners to both Ruby and Rails. I saw one reviewer at Amazon say it was incomplete. Dude! Read the cover. It’s for beginners and it’s only 360 pages. Of course it’s incomplete. It should be.

On Rails

No question, Rails sparked a ton on interest to an obscure language that Ruby used to be, as well as to the design of Rails itself. Rails is often pitted against ASP.NET as a lighter, better alternative. Fair enough.

I do feel jealous there’s no server control life cycle to battle. I’m sick of it. I wish it were abstracted better. Nikhil will not write an updated book (too time-consuming and only one Nikhil), so we’re stuck with the monstrous architecture for the foreseeable future.

I do feel jealous about the proper division into the model, view and controller. In all fairness, MVP (Model–View–Presenter) is achievable with the Web Client Software Factory. I haven’t tried, but I rely on David Hayden’s word here.

There’s a whole bunch of other things I’m jealous we don’t have in ASP.NET. And Ruby is often so much more expressive than C#.

At the end of the day, we’re back at square one of all framework fights: each one sucks and excels in its own days. While reading the book I couldn’t help thinking, “How would I go about this and that in our product if it were built on Rails.” I had no idea because ASP.NET seemed to offer so much more horsepower. Again, this is a beginner book, and I need to read some more to have a more objective opinion.

Maybe my perspective will change as I learn Rails tricks. But for the time being, I’m not joining the crowd who proclaim endless love to Ruby and Rails and go, “OMG! I’ve been wasting my life away on ASP.NET. It suxxors. Rails is the way.” A tool is a tool. Learn to get the most out of it, employ it in a proper setting, and guilty conscience will not wake you up at night.

Conclusion

Back to the book. If you want to wander outside the ASP.NET camp, give this book a try. I liked it. Oh, and follow Joe’s blog if you’re a freakin’ bookworm like me. :)

+1 to the born-again Wrox.