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.

Finally, on my way to learning Rails!

The problem was permissions on the MySQL database when following along on pg. 55 of Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide. It’s the first exercise of hooking up a database to Rails.

As part of building the MySQL table, the exercise has you execute the following line:

depot> mysql depot_development

Up to this point in the exercise, connecting to the database was done with the username “root” and no password. Everything worked fine. But executing the above line caused the following error.

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'ODBC'@'localhost' (using password: NO)

Can’t finish creating the database.  Rats!

The Solution

Long story short, the solution was found in the MySQL Error Log.  In it, I kept on seeing citations that had “port:3306″ in it.

Instead of trying to connect and build the database from the command line, like it’s illustrated in the book, I decided to use MySQL-Front to connect to the database.   But I still could not.
Now, the server that ships with Rails, WEBrick, apparently is on port 3000.  I tried that port in MySQL-Front.  No luck.

So, I tried using port 3306.  It connected just fine!

Now, I haven’t actually tried to manipulate the table in MySQL-front, or Rails, just yet because I’ve run out of timing trying to solve this problem, but I think I solved the problem.

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition
This is a comprehensive book on the Ruby language. It looks like a good choice to learn the language. I know there must be other good books out there, though. I just don’t have the time to go through them all to find the best one. This book is informally known as the “Pick Axe” book because of the front cover. The first edition of the book can be found online, here.

Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide
Looks like a fairly comprehensive guide to Rails. Of course, you need to know Ruby to get the most out of it. It’s also helpful to know a little bit of MySQL syntax for creating tables. Here’s one MySQL tutorial. Here’s another.

I’m also using a few websites in my quest to learn Ruby:

Ruby-doc.org: A great resource. Online documentation for classes found in the Ruby Core as well as the Standard Library. Has nice, tight introduction of Things That Newcomers to Ruby Should Know.

Ruby-lang.org: The official Ruby Language site. All things ruby, learning is only one part, so it’s a bit overwhelming for someone new to the language.

RubyGarden.org’s Wiki. Haven’t spent much time, but looks more useful to a beginner than the overwhelming Ruby-lang.org.

What’s Missing?

There’s one thing missing from the above list of resources: a good Ruby idioms resource. Idioms are ways to code things that are specific to Ruby. Idioms are typically confusing to people new to the language, but make sense on their own terms. I’m on the look out for a good idioms resource…

All the above assumes you have experience in at least one other object oriented language. These are not good resources to learn object oriented programming; so, if you’ve never programmed before, you’ll be lost.

I ran into one problem that you may have as well if you’re running Windows XP Pro. You need to run InstantRails.exe with administrator rights, otherwise it will not work. For the first time, I logged in as administrator. Once I did that, I was able to run InstantRails.exe with administrator rights, even though I wasn’t logged in as administrator. To do so yourself, right click on InstantRails.exe and choose “Run as…” and run as administator.

In other words, if you don’t have administrator rights, you can’t run Instant Rails.

IRB

One of the nice things about Ruby is IRB, Interactive Ruby. IRB allows you to run code and see results immediately. Choose Rail Applications\Open Ruby Console Window and type IRB. It’s a nice prototyping tool.

Who am I?

I haven’t programmed professionaly in about nine years. However, in my past I’ve programmed in C; a forth-like language called Magic/L; the iconic language Authorware; Macromedia Director (Lingo); Multimedia Toolbook (yeah, I’m showing my age), Apple Script (which is a great, object oriented language–too bad it wasn’t well supported), and a little Java a long time ago. I’m trying to generate extra income by creating a community site with a friend around women exercise enthusiasts. He’s a designer; I’m a strategy guy. We could hire a programmer…if we had the cash. So, I figure, being an old programmer, why not give development a shot? Then, when the sites at a point where we have a small audience, we can think about paying a programmer to take it to the next level.

Why Ruby on Rails?

Well, the choices were Ruby on Rails, Python with Django (or some other framework), or a Content Mangement System (CSM)…say, Mambo. I ruled out a CMS because our idea isn’t heavy on articles and I’d have to end up programming anyway to get a CMS to perform the way I wanted it to. With that kind of effort, why not just learn a language and a framework?

I’ve kind of wanted to learn Python, but I bought the hype that Ruby on Rails is quicker. I viewed some of the presentations at RubyonRails.org and felt that if I was going to put the time into learning a new language anyway, why not go for something that promises to be Really Quick for development.

Ruby is used by 37Signals for their project management tool, Basecamp. I heard Jason Fried, of 37 Signals, on a panel at SXSW and on a podcast from IT Conversations. I liked his philosophy of people over process and code over 3 inch binders of documentation. Ruby was designed with those types of principals in mind. To me, coding is about solving problems and providing value NOT about tomes of documentation that no one ever reads. (And I’m an old tech writer, too. I’ve written those tomes and stopped doing it early in my career).

Ruby holds the promise of quick development and has a development philosophy that appeals to me. I won’t be trying to bend a language built for corporate America into my freewheeling idea.  I’m programming for my own needs.  I don’t intend to go back to work for hire programming.
So, the potential’s there. Follow along with me to see what it takes to learn Ruby on Rails and see if the potential becomes realized.

Joel