After we exhausted talking about Second Life, the talk turned to Ruby. I was astounded by the fact that everyone was either working in Ruby, learning Ruby, or, with the exception of the one non-programmer, involved in discussing whether or not to use Ruby. All were talking about using Rails for web development.

A consensus emerged. Professional programmers, those who program for a living, love Agile Development with Rails. Those that are learning, but who haven’t programmed professionally for a few years (almost a decade for me), get more out of Ruby for Rails. An small, but interesting, observation.

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.