Learning Rails

After a number of months hiatus, I’m back to learning Ruby, again because I have ideas I want to sketch out in code. If I’m going to be learning a new language anyway, then Ruby seems to give me the most bang for the buck and seems to be easy to wrap my head around. My experience with object oriented coding has been with Lingo, Director’s language (back in the multimedia days), Java, and a Forth-like language called Magic/L back in the pre-cambrian period of programming. What’s really nice about Ruby is once I understood things like iterators, I saw how compact and English-like the language really could be. Odd, seeing as the language was invented by a Japaneese speaker whose second language is English.

I was talking about my frustrations about learning Ruby and Rails to my friend, David Sedlow, using the Agile Development with Rails book. We both come from a we-used-to-be-programmers but-haven’t-done-it-professionally-in-years background. (To me, the book needs to be user tested because it makes some assumptions that you already know Rails…inadvertently, or not.) David suggested Ruby for Rails by David A. Black. I have found Ruby for Rails easy to understand. It explains things in a logical sequence and explains them thoroughly. It’s also a nice mix between Ruby and Rails, making the reasonable assumption that you need to understand Ruby if you want to understand Rails.This book is enough to get started with Rails development. I believe between this and the The Pickaxe Book, I have what I need to get going with Ruby and Rails. I may not even need to the Pick Axe book, it’s that good at providing a basic understanding of Ruby.

Indeed, last night I hacked out a little screen scraper that prints out the items viewed from a youtube.com page. Not much, but with many ad agencies and brands putting their commercials on YouTube, I believe it could be a simple, useful tool. Give it a list of YouTube url’s to track and it returns a simple list of desired videos with the number of times they’ve been viewed. This tracking guide would be useful to folks in the marketing world.