Why Dont You Blog?

Well, it is a new month now so obviously more rants are required

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I actually quite like .net magazine and think it really is a worthwhile read. I even subscribe to it! So please take my complaints with that in mind.

Following on from our previous rant, it seems things have not improved this month. In fact, I suspect a lot of the articles are in fact “Aprils Fools” - only slightly late.

The cover disk still claims it offers tools worth “over £140″ - however I would be hard pushed to value the software anywhere near that level for insurance purposes… I suspect this is something that will never, ever go away with regards to computer magazines and their cover disks. Personally I would be happier if they dropped the magazine price by a pound and sacked the cover disk. I may be in the minority though

Anyway, the main thing I want to complain about is the bloody “Ruby on Rails” tutorial. If you have the magazine it is on pages 82 - 89 and is, simply put, the single worst tutorial I have ever come across in my life.

It is not just badly written, but this is a tutorial which appears to be aimed at getting novices up to speed with the rails development framework and help them produce an application.

You can tell it is going to be bad. This is the first paragraph:

Ruby on Rails (RoR) is an open source framework for the rapid development, testing and deployment of agile database-backed web applications. It is the marriage of Ruby, which is an elegant and powerful scripting language, and several classic programming design patterns. The result is a full-stack framework designed around the Model-View-Controller ( MVC) design pattern, which means you can use Ruby in all tiers of your application.

Now, I am not imagining things am I? Was that even in English? I cant help but get the feeling that the author (I will not name him, you can find it in the magazine) knows less about Ruby / Rails than he is letting on and has resorted to printing marketing blurbs from 37Signals.

Normally, .net tutorials are well written, informative and easy to follow. The Ruby on Rails article is none of that. While it is possible that if you follow the tutorial from start to finish you will have a working Ruby application, this is far from likely. The whole thing jumps from stage to stage, and of course suffers from the common computer tutorial problem of starting out for dummies then you turn the page and are expected to code the Hubble space telescope.

Every few sentence contain phrases like “We’ll leverage Rails to generate our application directory…” Seriously. It actually uses phrases like this as though they mean something. It is the worst abuse of the English language I have seen in (non-PR related) published material in a long time. The rest of the tutorial suffers from a combination of assumptions and “terminology gaffes.”

In parts, it seems to assume no prior knowledge at all, then jumps to startling difficult concepts which are hardly explained. The “migrations” are brought from no where and then readers are expected to start generating them. The section reads:

For our lightweight message board application, we need to generate two database tables: one for the discussion threads and another for posts left by users. To begin using migrations, run the migration generator for both by typing: (code)

Now, oddly, the only earlier reference to the word migration is about migrating data from one system to another (the examples give are MySQL to PostgreSQL). It is amazing. This happens repeatedly.

In essence, I suspect that even if you followed the tutorial line by line you would not end up with any better idea on how to use Ruby on Rails to develop web applications. I know I didnt.

Popularity: 9% [?]