Overall I took a lot away from reading this book. Its strength is the assumption the reader has never programmed before to any complexity so practically every line is thoroughly explained. I also took a lot away from it about the methodologies involved in creating and maintaining test regimes within the process.

The real question is would I feel confident to dive into a Ruby on Rails application by myself? No of course not. I don’t think many reading a single book with or without a project to walk through could seriously make any significant application the following week. But books aren’t actually about that. What Patrick Lenz has provided the reader is a solid understanding of what the framework can achieve and the overview necessary to learn more.

I would feel confident to use Ruby on Rails now for something simple. Or I would be confident to enter a team environment where Ruby on Rails was the framework. Nobody can really ask more of an entry level book. Whether I do use it or not is quite another story and only time will tell if I head down the Web 2.0 application trail. I have a few small ideas.

I did have a few minor hiccups with the book – particularly an inability to get ruby-debug downloaded and installed correctly. But that’s a minor issue. Even if that issue stole a little from my confidence to attempt something a little more complex. And let’s face it programming books are a hard slog so don’t expect the sections on debugging, testing, plugins and deployment to be anything but what they have to be.

I’d highly recommend anyone, particularly from an Object Oriented background, to pick this one up while its free over on Sitepoint. I think my next step is to work on something quite basic and solidify Patrick’s fundamental knowledge before thinking about making anything more advanced. But you never know your luck in the big city…

My question: why is it different using a framework of prewritten code? As opposed to a Content Management System (CMS) or ecommerce solution of pre-written code?

I ask this because somewhere in that argument is the perceived ideal of the coder generating pure unadulterated markup, styling and behaviour without using anything that came before. In my humble opinion this is exactly what you do when you pick up content management, blogging software and any number of web solutions out there. So why is it so different to picking up a library or framework and getting on with the job? Even a code purist must admit they couldn’t build the e-commerce site without that pile of pre-written code on the server. It all comes from somewhere. Even a lot of code you generate yourself is either inspired directly by, or includes legacy portions of, the code of your peers and teachers.

Here’s an example. Say I’m a new programmer learning Java and I need to do a gritty little thing like work out the circumference of a circle of given radius. Not only that but I need to take that circumference and output it as a rounded figure to the nearest centimetre. Do I really need to know the math involved in figuring the circumference from the radius? Or how to round a number? No. Why that is a no is because a fundamental part of programming is the use of functions to complete otherwise mundane tasks. And that reuse of code makes for less errors than if everyone jumped in and had to write the math part themselves. Functions speed up the process of development, make programs more compact and readable, and they improve the quality of the code by drawing on one source consistently to achieve the same functionality.

Which brings us back to libraries and frameworks. In essence they sit on top of the language – for example Rails sits on top of Ruby – where functions can be called to achieve tasks which might be repeatable across projects. There’s nothing new about that paradigm at all. Its exactly what happens, in a general sense, when I implement a shopping cart with someone’s prewritten code. So why is this all such a bother to code purists?

James Bennett wrote a great article this week titled Lets talk about frameworks (again) where he points out the difference between frameworks, libraries and snippets. I think its a must read. It offers a larger perspective, albeit not the only one, about what frameworks might or might not achieve for us as developers. The technician versus the artist. Without doubt there are many like myself who are somewhere between the poles of technician and artist.

Recently I’ve been working through Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz. And why not? I am at the end of a Bachelor of Computing which heavily focused on Object Oriented Programming (OOP). I am an intermediate level Java Programmer in Java 2 Standard Edition and have completed work in Java 2 Micro Edition as well as C, PHP, SQL, machine and assembly code, UNIX, JavaScript and other languages. I think on the whole the leap into Ruby and then into Rails isn’t something that should be thrown back at me simply because I’ve decided to adopt a framework for a project. I have worked in web standards semantic markup for at least the last four years so have paid my dues. I would hardly describe myself as someone who just jumps into a framework as if its day one of my programming career.

So I think its wrong to slate everyone who uses a framework as getting a free ride. Maybe there are those who do get a free ride from frameworks and libraries but many of us can actually program to some extent already or worked with semantic markup and Cascading Stylesheets before picking up a framework. At least significantly enough that the framework is not a black box solution.

Yes I do think people should at least learn some fundamentals of the underlying language before they embark with frameworks and libraries but that of itself isn’t a condemnation of the methodology. Its a suggestion to the implementers in just the same way I would suggest the use of a mattock over a shovel in some situations.

In the end it comes down to where the rubber meets the road – your current abilities, the project at hand and the constraints which make using a framework significantly beneficial to spend time to learn. I’m enjoying riding the rails at this point. Toot, toot. All aboard.