Rails learn's confusion

This is a beginner's rails learning confusion. When I learn rails, from time to time, I feel frustra开发者_JS百科ted on rails' principle "Convention over Configuration". Rails uses heavily on conventions. A lot of them are just naming conventions. If I forget a convention, I will either use the wrong naming and get unexpected result or get things magically done but don't understand how. Sometimes, I think of configuration. At least configuration lists everything clearly and nothing is in fog. In rails, there seems a hidden, dark contract between you and the machine. If you follow the contract, you communicate well. But a beginner usually forgets items listed on the contract and this usually leads to confusion.

That's why when I first pick up rails, I feel like it is somehow difficult to learn. Besides, there are many other things that could be new to a learner, such as using git, using plugins from community, using RESTful routing style, using RSpec. All these are new and come together in learning ruby and rails. This definitely adds up difficulties for a beginner.

In contrast, if you learn php, it wouldn't be that bad. You can forget many things and focus on learning php itself. You don't need to learn database handling if you know SQL already(in rails, you need to learn a whole new concept migration), you don't have to learn a new decent unit test(in rails, usually they teach RSpec along the way because rails is agile and you should learn test-driven development in the early learning stage), you don't have to learn a new version control(in rails, you will be taught about git anyway), you don't have to use complicated plugins(in rails, they usually use third-party plugins in textbook examples! what the hell? why not teach how to do a simplified similar thing in rails?), you don't have to worry RESTful style.

All in all, when I learn php, I learn it quick and soon I start to write things myself. Learning php is similar to learning C/java. It tastes like those traditional languages. When I learn rails, it is more difficult. And I need to learn ruby as well (I believe many of you learn ruby just because of rails).

Does anyone have the similar feeling as I have? How do you overcome it and start to master rails? Hints will be welcomed. Thank you.

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You do need to learn Ruby. Ruby is a language. It has its own quirks. You don't need to learn a lot of Ruby, but you can't learn no ruby and expect to write anything decent.

Next, you do need to learn the Rails conventions. Learning the conventions means that you don't need to learn the Ruby networking classes. If you don't want to learn the conventions, then writing anything of value will be difficult.

It's really no different than learning C# (as a language), then learning an MVC framework, like ASP.NET MVC, or FubuMVC.

Yes, you throw up a anything in PHP, learning a lot less in the process. But investment is valuable. Your education is valuable.

Learning takes time. Modelling is important, and I've seen some ugly Rails code because the authors were poor modellers. Those poor models turned into ugly databases. But it still worked! It met that customer's needs.

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You comparision Rails with PHP does not hold, since Rails is a framework and PHP is a language. You should compare Ruby with PHP, or Rails with some PHP framework (I am not familiar with PHP frameworks and do not know an example)

But you are right about the things that 'magically' happen with Rails. I too had problems understanding them and looked many things in the Rails code to see what was actually happening and why.

To learn Rails you should first learn the language on which it is build (like you should do with any framework IMHO), so learn Ruby first. Personally I liked Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book a lot. It is written in a easy and nice way and is not boring/serious like a lot of books on languages.

After that I read/did all tutorials/guides on http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ they covert the (important!) basics and tell about the Rails specific things you are writing about.

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When I first heard of Rails the claim was that you could build a web app ten times faster than the other frameworks. I always thought this was an exaggeration.

Most of the conventions are hard to remember if you don't have ten years of doing it the 'configuration' way. So, for someone new to web development it is hard to remember all the conventions and to understand why they are important. I definitely did not see a ten time increase in productivity. Routing, for example, probably started nice and simple but grew more and more complex. I think some effort should be made (perhaps by the people writing Rails books) to not try and throw every capability out there to confuse newbies.