I was going to say the same thing and figured someone else already had.
People would often ask how I knew so much about rails and, ya, the answer is that I read the guides. They are extremely readable and it doesn't take that long. Like a couple of days. You might be surprised how much is retained by just reading through them, even without actually trying things out as you go.
I would like to stress: read the guides, not the docs. Use the docs for reference.
I've skimmed the guides. They never contain anything useful. They're just a bunch of recipes. They don't actually document a darned thing.
Programming is not regurgitating recipes without understanding. Copilot can do that. Programming is actually understanding both the problem domain and the solution space, and knowing how to find some permutation of elements in the solution space to address anything in the problem domain.
The rails guides document about 10% of the problem domain. That's mostly ok, because the problem domain exists in the wider world, and there's lots of documentation elsewhere. The problem is that the rails guides document about 1% of the solution space. And that's an issue, because rails claims to be the solution space.
Rails routing is done by passing a block into the framework that's instance_exec'd on... Something. Want to know what, so that you know what API is available to you? Too bad. Here are a list of recipes for the couple most common things you might want to do. Want to do anything more sophisticated, or just understand what your options are? Uh, sorry.
Oh, you want to set and read cookies? Here's a recipe for how to read cookies and how to set them with lots of options. You changed how you're setting cookies and now browsers are returning two cookies of the same name and you want to know how to detect and fix this? Silence from the rails guides! (In fairness, the rack documentation actually included enough information to solve that. But it wasn't mentioned in the rails guides about cookie handling. And the rack documentation was a specification, not a guide. It actually tells you what pieces there are and describes their semantics.)
And it just goes on and on. Rails has about one hundred options for every one actually mentioned in the guides. In some sense that's a good thing. The guides only give you an incredibly limited set of tools. It's very good that the rest exist. But it means that the guides are a very bad way to learn rails, because they don't give you enough information to solve unforeseen problems yourself, or even enough information to understand code someone else wrote to solve those issues.
They put you in the position of hoping someone else anticipated your weird problem and already told you how to solve it. They don't equip you for solving anything weird by yourself.
When people ask me how to improve their programming this is my first advice - speed read docs/stdlib top to bottom and keep writing a lot of little things. It’s amazing how many people choose painful path of learning through osmosis.
If you want to make an app from scratch, you must first understand the universe.
This is a ludicrous approach for most. Sure, if you learn from reading and love to read technical manuals, go for it. But to imply this is the best way for most to learn is completely ridiculous.
It's the single most irritating interaction I have had with a coworker, and I have had it at least once at every job I've ever had.
"Hey, thing xyz is super confusing, can you (help me use it|explain how it works|rewrite it so I understand it)?"
"Did you read the document I sent? The document (has sample code that does the thing you're trying to do|explains how it works|explains why the simpler approach doesn't actually work in practice)"
"...No."
It's incredible how some devs can learn 15-20 different programming languages, and completely forget English in the process.
Call me crazy, I’d just rather read the relevant section of code I am working on and be able to understand it from there, rather than first having to understand the entire universe.
When working with a framework, it helps to understand the framework. Then, all the individual pieces make better sense. The advantage is that you only have to gain this understanding once.
A framework is a social contract, if you will. The framework authors are taking on the onus of some complexity to give you a cleaner and easier to grok codebase. The tradeoff is that you do need to read the guides or you will be diving deep into framework internals whenever you want to understand some app level code.
The problem with RoR is that it's an all-encompassing framework. It gives you a huge collection of things you typically don't need — entire major layers like the database are frequently completely irrelevant to projects. This isn't just true of small projects, but can often extend to a large part of a career.
One of the grave dangers that older/wiser programmers have learned is to stop trying to pathologically "drink the entire river". Programming has a constant deluge of new frameworks, tools, and publications coming out, and it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need to know, well, everything. I know a lot of 'aspiring programmers' who accomplish next to nothing precisely because they waste most of their time reading about programming instead of actually practicing it. It's sadly rather similar to 'aspiring writers', or any other craft — some reading is helpful, but not when it crowds out the actual task it's meant to teach. Life is short, and you have a choice between "actually making things" and "doing prep work for making things". That's all reading the docs is — it's just prep work. It's completely useless unless it parlays into actually accomplishing things.
There are semi-rare cases where some language/framework is actually teaching you new fundamentals and is worth deep-reading to gain core skills as a programmer. Haskell broke new ground. Lisp was enlightening. Smalltalk was a worthy historical study. Rust is genuinely changing things. Unfortunately, Rails just isn't special.
When I was considerably younger, I used to pathologically do this — I used to buy books on programming, and read them like a school textbook "exam cram". I read entire books on languages (like Perl) that ended up exiting the zeitgeist before I ever did any work in them — and I now have no reason to do so (I feel sorry for Perl, because Larry Wall seems like a cool guy, but perhaps it's a testament to its influence on other languages that it no longer has uniquely redeeming features). I even read books on various applications. Naively, at the time, I looked at learning as a pure, unalloyed good — rather than a dangerous spend of lifetime I'll never get back.
I deeply regret wasting that time on that instead of learning a meaningful skill.
> The problem with RoR is that it's an all-encompassing framework. It gives you a huge collection of things you typically don't need — entire major layers like the database are frequently completely irrelevant to projects.
You do know you can just turn off the parts you don’t want, don’t you?
Don’t want database support? Just turn it off or don’t include it in the first place.
Rails doesn’t have to be “special” it just has to get the job done and it does.
Agreed but as evident in this post's discussion, developers only have the desire to do so once for <insert-favorite-web-framework> and then the need to do so again for any other framework is understood as the other being clearly terrible and immature.
This is a fine answer if you're responsible for a small numbers of technologies, otherwise there are far too many "top to bottom" docs to read in a lifetime, let alone the time you have to meet whatever deadline is in front of you.
Where it gets even trickier, is that these days nobody is responsible for just a small numbers of technologies.
Does your app use the internet? Read about TCP/IP and DNS and other internet technologies top to bottom.
Does your app use a database? Read the DB docs top to bottom.
How about multiple data stores?
Is you app publicly facing? Read about 100 different potential security issues top to bottom.
I could go on...
Only if the docs were good enough! You always have to look at the source code for most Gems and it's full of unnecessary "magic". I guess Django is a much better alternative because of Python different school of thought
sodapopcan|4 years ago
People would often ask how I knew so much about rails and, ya, the answer is that I read the guides. They are extremely readable and it doesn't take that long. Like a couple of days. You might be surprised how much is retained by just reading through them, even without actually trying things out as you go.
I would like to stress: read the guides, not the docs. Use the docs for reference.
chowells|4 years ago
Programming is not regurgitating recipes without understanding. Copilot can do that. Programming is actually understanding both the problem domain and the solution space, and knowing how to find some permutation of elements in the solution space to address anything in the problem domain.
The rails guides document about 10% of the problem domain. That's mostly ok, because the problem domain exists in the wider world, and there's lots of documentation elsewhere. The problem is that the rails guides document about 1% of the solution space. And that's an issue, because rails claims to be the solution space.
Rails routing is done by passing a block into the framework that's instance_exec'd on... Something. Want to know what, so that you know what API is available to you? Too bad. Here are a list of recipes for the couple most common things you might want to do. Want to do anything more sophisticated, or just understand what your options are? Uh, sorry.
Oh, you want to set and read cookies? Here's a recipe for how to read cookies and how to set them with lots of options. You changed how you're setting cookies and now browsers are returning two cookies of the same name and you want to know how to detect and fix this? Silence from the rails guides! (In fairness, the rack documentation actually included enough information to solve that. But it wasn't mentioned in the rails guides about cookie handling. And the rack documentation was a specification, not a guide. It actually tells you what pieces there are and describes their semantics.)
And it just goes on and on. Rails has about one hundred options for every one actually mentioned in the guides. In some sense that's a good thing. The guides only give you an incredibly limited set of tools. It's very good that the rest exist. But it means that the guides are a very bad way to learn rails, because they don't give you enough information to solve unforeseen problems yourself, or even enough information to understand code someone else wrote to solve those issues.
They put you in the position of hoping someone else anticipated your weird problem and already told you how to solve it. They don't equip you for solving anything weird by yourself.
jbverschoor|4 years ago
Documentation is important. Otherwise you’ll just google for tutorials which are often outdated and still don’t cover the architecture/design.
It’s also fun to see all the little decisions and tools available if you read (properly written) docs
Granted you need to have proper docs
mirekrusin|4 years ago
jmondi|4 years ago
This is a ludicrous approach for most. Sure, if you learn from reading and love to read technical manuals, go for it. But to imply this is the best way for most to learn is completely ridiculous.
weatherlite|4 years ago
calt|4 years ago
ryukoposting|4 years ago
"Hey, thing xyz is super confusing, can you (help me use it|explain how it works|rewrite it so I understand it)?"
"Did you read the document I sent? The document (has sample code that does the thing you're trying to do|explains how it works|explains why the simpler approach doesn't actually work in practice)"
"...No."
It's incredible how some devs can learn 15-20 different programming languages, and completely forget English in the process.
jmondi|4 years ago
givemeethekeys|4 years ago
MadcapJake|4 years ago
Jetrel|4 years ago
One of the grave dangers that older/wiser programmers have learned is to stop trying to pathologically "drink the entire river". Programming has a constant deluge of new frameworks, tools, and publications coming out, and it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need to know, well, everything. I know a lot of 'aspiring programmers' who accomplish next to nothing precisely because they waste most of their time reading about programming instead of actually practicing it. It's sadly rather similar to 'aspiring writers', or any other craft — some reading is helpful, but not when it crowds out the actual task it's meant to teach. Life is short, and you have a choice between "actually making things" and "doing prep work for making things". That's all reading the docs is — it's just prep work. It's completely useless unless it parlays into actually accomplishing things.
There are semi-rare cases where some language/framework is actually teaching you new fundamentals and is worth deep-reading to gain core skills as a programmer. Haskell broke new ground. Lisp was enlightening. Smalltalk was a worthy historical study. Rust is genuinely changing things. Unfortunately, Rails just isn't special.
When I was considerably younger, I used to pathologically do this — I used to buy books on programming, and read them like a school textbook "exam cram". I read entire books on languages (like Perl) that ended up exiting the zeitgeist before I ever did any work in them — and I now have no reason to do so (I feel sorry for Perl, because Larry Wall seems like a cool guy, but perhaps it's a testament to its influence on other languages that it no longer has uniquely redeeming features). I even read books on various applications. Naively, at the time, I looked at learning as a pure, unalloyed good — rather than a dangerous spend of lifetime I'll never get back.
I deeply regret wasting that time on that instead of learning a meaningful skill.
multiplegeorges|4 years ago
This is why Rails is so good at what it does.
I don't want it to be special. I want it to be mature, work, and allow me to be productive. I have work to do!
Lio|4 years ago
You do know you can just turn off the parts you don’t want, don’t you?
Don’t want database support? Just turn it off or don’t include it in the first place.
Rails doesn’t have to be “special” it just has to get the job done and it does.
Drew_|4 years ago
arpyzo|4 years ago
Where it gets even trickier, is that these days nobody is responsible for just a small numbers of technologies.
Does your app use the internet? Read about TCP/IP and DNS and other internet technologies top to bottom. Does your app use a database? Read the DB docs top to bottom. How about multiple data stores? Is you app publicly facing? Read about 100 different potential security issues top to bottom. I could go on...
4m1rk|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]