I few weeks ago I picked up “Rails for .NET Developers”,by Jeff Cohen and Brian Eng, and practically read it from cover-to-cover in about a week and a half’s time. It was a very informative read, and I was looking for a jumping-off point to really get into Rails, and I figured a book supposedly written for “my kind” would be a great way to start.
After reading through the book, I realized that all I really needed was an intermediate to advanced guide for Rails, and didn’t necessarily need any correlation to .NET. The book did a fine job presenting most of what I wanted, but as a programmer I just need to learn syntax, guidelines and cool tricks and I can begin to write in any language—that’s typical for most any programmer. If I had to do it all over again, I may have chosen a different book that just focused on Rails and not one that compared it to another language in an effort to ease the transition.
Now that I’ve got a handle on Rails, I’ve been digging into the Ruby language, and trying to pick up more tips on that front. It was beyond the scope of the book to go into a lot of depth on Ruby, so I’m not docking it points because of that.
The Good: Great introduction to developing Rails apps. Straightforward examples and nice side-by-side comparisons of .NET code vs the Ruby/Rails equivalent (you honestly save many lines of code going the Rails way, being that Ruby is such an opinionated language).
The Bad: None really, just a personal critique that I should have picked up a book that was only focused on Rails.
The Ugly: Reminders of how horrible development in .NET webforms can be. From now on, I only want to develop in MVC platforms. Clean, testable separation of concerns.
