To celebrate the close of the Holiday Practical Ruby and Rails blogging contest I wanted to post this interview with Eldon Alameda. He and I spent some time talking about his new book Practical Rails Projects
Why do you think Rails is a practical framework for Web development?
Eldon I think my answer for this is pretty boring because it’s the common things that we always hear about when describing Rails. Rails not only made it easy for web developers to adopt many of the best practices that we had been giving lip service to for years, but it did it in an attractive and fun way that consistently rewarded you for doing things “the right way”.
For me – Rails made web development feel right again which brought back a lot of the fun that had originally attracted me to becoming a web developer.
What makes a Rails project ‘practical’?
Eldon I guess that depends on your definition of practical ;-) But in the context of the book I was thinking of the projects as “practical” based on the ideals that they were involved in the practice of Rails Development. So for me, what I really wanted to do with this book – was to create a series of projects that would help people learn Rails. I’m a big believer in the idea that the best way to learn a language or framework is to build a variety of projects with it. On my own hard drive I have a huge mess of dummy applications that were built just to play around with a specific feature or plugin, and I think that type of playfulness and experimentation is one of the keys to my success in web development.
How did you settle on the projects in the book?
Eldon Well like i said I for this book I wanted to try and help the readers by guiding them through the creation of a series of projects designed to explore features of Rails that I thought were important to understand but that might get breezed over in other books. So in that regard – I considered the project practical if I thought it was teaching something that would help build a better understanding of a principle or feature that would be beneficial to Rails developers as they launch into their own projects.
On the other hand though, I really wanted to try and make sure that the readers would actually have the opportunity to engage their own minds while building the projects, so I wanted to avoid too much “spoon-feeding” of the information to the reader. So I also tried to choose projects that might have a fun twist or angle on them – that we could get up and running fairly quickly in the book but leave ample opportunity afterwards for the reader to expand upon the ideas and projects to customize them for their own needs.
I really wanted to help people move from book/head knowledge of Rails to more hands-on experience.
How important do you think it is for a Rails developer to really know Ruby? What about getting involved in the Ruby community?
Eldon I actually think that a Rails developer can get pretty far with Rails before having to dig into Ruby. I like to joke that Rails is the doorway drug to using Ruby, because Rails really does make it possible to build some pretty complex applications with code that can appear fairly simple. Someone building a site in Rails may not even realize that they’re using things like blocks, iterators, etc. So in that regard it helps ease people into Ruby. Of course to provide balance to that statement – there is a pretty significant glass ceiling that comes into play for Rails developers who don’t dig deeper into Ruby (and SQL for that matter).
I do however think that it’s critical to get involved with the Ruby community at least at the local level. I’ve been attending my local Ruby users group for over two years now and I can’t begin to express what a wonderful blessing it has been to me along the way. It’s one of those few meetings that I truly look forward to every month. As I was starting out with Ruby – it was fantastic to be able to interact with Sr. Ruby developers who were kind enough to explain things or point me in the right direction for solving problems.
What did you learn about Rails while you were writing this book?
Eldon Curiously enough, writing a book like this has a dual edge sword – On the one hand I had to dig deeper into subjects that I wanted to teach in the book. So I have a much deeper understanding of subjects like caching, REST, and ActionWebService than I had before (or probably even need). On the negative side – focusing on the projects in the book meant that I had less time for personal experimentation which means that I “missed out / fell behind” on some pretty interesting developments within the Rails community this last year. Most notably was the wide adoption of Rpsec and the BDD paradigm – so once I’m past the holidays – I’m looking forward to going through the Peepcode screencasts on Rspec and setting up some test projects to experiment with that deeper.
What can Rails learn from other web frameworks?
Eldon I don’t want to stir up controversy but the only other web frameworks that I’ve built some production applications in are a few of the PHP based ones and the ones that I used really felt like they were behind the curve compared to Rails. Too much configuration, too many common problems left unsolved, etc. In some cases they just felt like they were simply trying to copy Rails rather than adopt the good pieces of Rails and forge their own path.
I haven’t had the opportunity to use Django yet but some people that I really respect are huge fans of it so I’m hoping to dabble in it a little next year—especially now that the official book is out.
Other than that now that I’m finished with the book—I’ve finally had a some more time to spend playing around with some of up and coming alternatives to Rails. This last month I experimented with things like Sinatra, Merb and DataMapper (which isn’t a framework but an alternative ORM). Of those – my favorite so far is DataMapper – even though it still has a ways to go before it would be ready for production – it’s a really fun library.
The interesting thing to me about these new ruby libraries is how reactionary they feel to Rails. There seems to be an emphasis on simplicity with how these new libraries are being developed that is kind of refreshing. Performance with these new libraries feels really good too.
How do you think the Rails community should react to these libraries?
Eldon Honestly I think that the relevant ideas will naturally make their way into Rails over time. While these other libraries have some fun and interesting ideas – I don’t see any pressure to try and push those ideas into Rails. One of the things that has always impressed me about Rails is it’s ability to glean best practices / ideas and integrate them into it’s own core in a fairly clean and natural way. Yet at the same time – Rails has maintained it’s strong opinions about what is the “right” way to develop web applications.
So in the case of DataMapper – I think it’s wonderful that we as developers can have other ORMs that we can use within our Ruby projects, but I don’t think I would ever want to see Rails adapt to support it and Active Record. Choice isn’t always good.
What plans do you have to follow up on the book? (A sequel, a blog/website, or something else?)
Eldon That is the million dollar question isn’t it? Unfortunately I don’t have a solid answer at the moment.
My days lately have been filled with doing contract work for the National Weather Service. It’s not Rails but it’s a lot of fun because of the scale of the web applications there. Those are fun problems to solve and I’ve been having a little extra fun there by introducing Ruby into a lot of the backend processing.
I’ve also been looking around to see if I could find a side Rails project that would interest me and fit with my schedule. But haven’t found anything thats really jumped out at me. I don’t have a ton of free time and I don’t want to waste it building “yet-another-social-networking site”.
I have been thinking about writing a sequel to this book as there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t get to cover in this book. I consider this book to be a beginner to intermediate book, so if I was to write another one I would want to take it up to the intermediate – advanced level. To do that I’d probably need to decrease the scope from seven to eight projects down to only two or three but dig much deeper into those few projects.
What projects did you want to include, but didn’t make the cut? Why not?
Eldon Actually, for me the bigger challenge was stopping development on each of the projects when I felt I hit that sweet spot where the project was up and running yet there was still plenty of room to customize it or take it in some fun new directions. But my goal was that if I was having all kinds of fun ideas about where to take the project next and it was hard for me to stop the project then hopefully it would also be hard for a reader to abandon it at that point as well.
That’s not to say that all of the projects I had originally wanted made it into the book. For example – I had planned on a completely different approach for a project that would utilize the new Active Resource library. The original plan was to develop three small applications (an inventory system, a simple wiki and a help desk ticketing system) that were going to be designed to communicate with each other via Active Resource. I think it could have been a fun and cool way to see how multiple applications could intercommunicate their data with each other. I even had built and written the chapters for the simple ticketing system and had some rough stuff started for the wiki and inventory systems—unfortunately I was using the needs of my employer at the time to help shape how that project should work. When I left that company – I had to make the hard decision to also abandon those projects from the book as well.
That’s too bad, it sounds like it would have made a cool set of projects.
Eldon Yeah – it was disappointing because I thought it was going to be a fun set of projects and nice that it was actually solving a problem for some people. In it’s place I put a project that used Active Resource to pull contact data from 37signals Highrise application and display those contacts on a Yahoo map. So I think that even though the projects are different the same principles were demonstrated / taught in a way that a reader could build the original projects if they desired.
What books would you recommend to get people ready for yours? What about as potential follow-ups?
Eldon I tried to write the book so that it could be a good next step for someone who has read an introduction to Rails book. As for a good introduction book I’m still a huge fan of the Agile Web Development book (even if it is a little out of date these days). The key is that the reader should have some basic familiarity with building a Rails application and some general idea of the features that Rails provides.
As for follow-up books – I’m a huge Ruby book junkie ( I think I have all the available books ) and every book will typically have at least something good in it. But for best value of learning code vs. price – I would recommend these:
Ruby Specific:
- Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby — Just such as fun book to read and a great introduction to Ruby. Free
- Ruby By Example
- Design Patterns In Ruby
Rails Specific:
- Money Train by Ben Curtis — PDF only book on building an e-commerce system. Doesn’t show you how to actually build anything but it’s filled with plenty of code examples $12
- Rails Code Review by Geoffrey Grosenbach (Peepcode) — Another great PDF book that demonstrates code $9
- Advanced Rails Recipes
- RailsCasts Screencasts — not a book but the information in these is invaluable. FREE
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