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I finished working through Head First Rails.  Here are my impressions:

1. I like Rails — a lot.  I naturally compared it to Struts functionality while reading through the book, since that is the framework I know best.  One of the things that frustrated me about Struts was that it was so flexible that it was hard to know the best way to accomplish something.  So you would take time to try different approaches and search the web to see how other people do it. For pretty unique functionality, that’s to be expected. But for really common tasks like authentication, or database access, it was frustrating to spend so much time on those things. I was looking for opinionated software and I didn’t even know it.

2. Before moving to Java, I spent some time in the world of Microsoft — specifically VB6, then asp (classic).  The thing that frustrated me most about working with those technologies was that while those technologies had clear direction on how to accomplish common tasks, trying to customize those common tasks was a nightmare.  You want a data grid — great!  But don’t think about making it work in a way that Microsoft didn’t intend for it to work.  Because of that, even when I was thoroughly frustrated with lack of direction in Struts, I would’t have traded it to go back to Microsoft’s ways.  Based on those experiences, what I really like about Rails is that although it perscribes ways for you to accomplish common tasks, you are given the ability to modify it if needed, or swap out technologies if you want.

3. The book was a little …. boring.  I LOVE Head First Design Patterns, and Head First Rails would be an excellent book to start with it you don’t have a lot of experience in web development. But web dev concepts are very familiar to me, so it was hard to concentrate on it and only focus on the parts new to me (the rails).  To be honest, I diligently worked through the exercises until chapter 7. After that, I started skimming because I don’t want to take up more time going over ground I’m already familiar with.

4. After finishing it, I feel like I have a good but shallow understanding of the concepts or Rails. So my next step is to look for a book that goes deeper into Rails.  But even before that, I may read through a book just on Ruby, because HFR barely touched on Ruby and I want to learn the language, not just a framework that uses it.

So, I’ve been taking dual paths lately: SLOWLY reading a Java certification book during the day, and reading the Head First Rails book in the evening.  I’m going very slowly through the Java book because it’s what I read while my incredibly slow computer at work freezes up while auto-saving documents, or while it freezes up because a new email popped up, or while it freezes up because I moved the mouse too quickly.  <off_topic_rant>Can I just say that Vista is the devil?  It’s been said a brazillion times, but I’ll say it again.  I’m sure on a fancy new machine it’s sleek as an otter, but it has no business on a machine with 1GB RAM.  I mean, this machine still has a FLOPPY DRIVE.  Can you even still buy floppies?</off_topic_rant>

On the other hand, the RoR book has been a lot of fun! I’m a little perplexed by the approach, because they’re not too concerned with the Ruby part. And they demonstrate that you don’t need to know that much Ruby to get started.  But it just feels weird.  It’s going too fast!  I haven’t crawled yet, and they’re telling me to enter a 5k race.  But I know that’s just old-timey whining.  Back in my day, we learned to program from the beginning, with a Hello World! statement. And we liked it! We liked it just fine!

So, I’m plowing through it — scaffolding CRUD in the blink of an eye — and learning to enjoy the ride.