Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Ruby on Rails

I started playing with Ruby on Rails. It's a combination of an easy programming language and a web application framework with database linking that allows you to quickly develop web applications. I started looking into it a little deeper because I was interested in knowing how to make e-commerce sites (online catalogues and the like).

A friend of mine in Ottawa had initially told me about and my brother piqued my interest after he explained how it worked. I went out and bought a couple of books (RoR for Dummies and RailsSpace)

In hindsight, the Dummies book may have been a bit of a waste of money, but it may prove useful down the road. RailsSpace, on the other hand is pretty neat. The book has an online portion to it were you can look at the code a little easier and copy/paste to save you the typing.

The Ruby syntax is pretty easy to learn so far. It's fairly intuitive and a lot of the coding is not cryptic at all...you kind of write down what you have in mind. Have a look for yourself: this site lets you try it out.

The person who wrote that tutorial definitely has a unique brain. Obviously and out-of-the-box thinker. He/She wrote the strangest guide book. I'm not sure how useful it is for learning code, but the pictures are pretty entertaining.

Anyways, I'll slowly be chipping away at the RoR stuff. My interest in it got me thinking about what it would be like to be a programmer for a living. I decided to try a programming course to get a better taste for it.

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