I figured the first thing that I ought to do it to figure out the answer to the question Rails 2.x or 3?
To the initiated, that’s probably a pretty simple question but for someone like me, coming back after a long “it’s not you, it’s me” thing, it wasn’t that easy.
First there was the stability question. R3 is relatively new, which led really to two questions: Is it stable and is there enough documentation out there to get me going? I didn’t really dwell on the stability question long. First off, I know that the Ruby/Rails community (for the most part) are test Zealots. That and there’s tons of eyeballs out there on the code also brought me great comfort. What I wasn’t sure of though was all the gems and plug-ins. How much of a departure was R3 from R2.x and how long will it take the ecosystem to catch up.
The documentation question also had nested concerns. The Rails community is great at producing how-to’s and tutorials but again, how fast are they to react to the new Rails version? My normal “go to” sources peepcode.com and railscasts.com seemed to not quite be there yet, though working on it.
I also wanted some industrial strength goodness that I could tap. I don’t think I could take another “build a blog in 15 minutes” tutorial. Though interesting and helpful, many of these resources don’t really delve into the nitty gritty of a production application and cover deployment, testing and some of the other tips and tricks hard won by seasoned rails developers.
I was lucky enough to come upon Michael Hart’s excellent Rails 3 tutorial “Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example”. As it turned out it was almost exactly what I needed. Though the example used in the book is the often used “Twitter Clone”, it was comprehensive enough to be interesting and engaging. Most valuable though was picking up tips and tricks and helpful plug-ins along the way. Believe it or not, I had never used git before. When I’m not stuck with CVS, I’m likely using SVN. Similarly, Hart introduces TDD via RSpec, Heroku, setting up your environment and of course all the R3 goodness including a vast universe of gems that have proven invaluable.
Up for next week … I’ll start researching/brainstorming a workable layout and doing battle with CSS and ERB!
