David Alison's Blog

I've now been using Ruby on Rails for a little over a year and have found it to be a fantastic environment to build web based applications. The last year has not been without some serious pain and learning curves and while I hardly consider myself a master of the environment I've found a number of resources that may help you if you are considering using RoR as a development platform. Sure, you can access nearly everything you need to learn RoR online but I am personally still addicted to the dead-tree model of learning. If you are like me and prefer buying books then read on. In the last year I've bought 10 books on various Ruby/Rails topics and what follows are the ones I've gotten the most use out of. NOTE: Ruby on Rails is a constantly evolving environment and the information below is really relevant for early June 2009. Things can change in the Rails world relatively quickly. It's a good idea to stay up on Rails developments by following the Ruby on Rails blog...

I've been doing development work for quite a while and up until my recent switch to Mac I had been doing that work using Microsoft technologies; on the database side I was using Microsoft SQL Server. When I started playing around with Ruby on Rails I also needed to switch out the underlying database I was using, settling in on the wildly popular MySQL . Though there is a huge amount of information available online for MySQL I still like purchasing technical books and I cast about for a decent entry level book on the topic. What I found was Ben Forta's MySQL Crash Course . If you are trying to learn MySQL, especially if you are new to SQL in general, this book is a must buy, especially given the price. The presentation is consistent throughout and Ben frames most commands with Input, Output and Analysis. He demonstrates what a particular command looks like in Input, displays the results of the command in Output and then discusses the nuances of the command in Analysis. His wri...

Since I've been learning Ruby on Rails I decided to take a step back and become as proficient as possible with TextMate . For those that don't know about it, TextMate is a fantastic editor available exclusively on the Mac platform. What makes it such a great editor is not that it has a wonderful editing surface or is able to save files faster than some other tool - from that standpoint it's not really all that different than TextEdit. What make TextMate so cool is that it provides some great extensions - called Bundles - that can help you use it much as you might an Interactive Development Environment (IDE) in a complete development package. You can either create your own Bundles with language templates and helpers or you can choose from a large array of different Bundles that are freely available for TextMate. There is a very good Ruby on Rails bundle that actually ships with TextMate. It has a number of features that can not only make quick work of class and definition ta...

I'm about a week into my learning experience with Ruby on Rails and have encountered a few challenges and also found a couple of resources I'd like to share with you. As with most "as you go" experiences, these blog entries are a point in time picture of where I am so I haven't gotten all of this figured out just yet. My model for learning In recent years when I adopted a new language or development environment I would simply breeze through the documentation and especially the tutorials. I figured, what the hell, I'm a developer with over 25 years of programming experience. I'm well versed in object oriented principles, design and coding practices, etc. This won't be hard! The reality is by simply scanning over the tutorial information I was doing myself a disservice, learning a surface level knowledge of the development model. I would pay the price when I would start to do my actual application development work, making my mistakes in my real code. I ...

I've had this on-again, off-again experience with Ruby on Rails . For those of you that don't know Ruby on Rails is a really simple framework and model for building Web applications very quickly and easily. This is not new news and in fact Ruby on Rails has gotten some very significant attention. As a Microsoft guy for many years I simply glanced in the direction of Rails and said "meh". I was immersed in the Microsoft development tools for so many years I wasn't willing to look very hard at things outside my .Net / Visual Studio / C# comfort zone. My positive experience with my Mac switch led me to rethink that strategy, or at least give it a much better try than the quick glances I gave it before. I did a lot of research, found a lot of information and have found lots of controversy as to whether there is a future in Ruby on Rails. I've also found lots of evidence that some pretty large sites are using Ruby on Rails for their projects. In spite of all that...