OSCON - Training Day 1

Today: Ruby and Rails Verdict: Better than awesome!

First thoughts: Instructor name’s David Thomas. First thing on my mind: Wendy’s. lol, sorry, had to get that off my mind.

Anywho, David Thomas and Mike Clark were the instructors for The Ruby Guidebook and The Rails Guidebook. For my first tutorials of OSCON, this definitely caught my attention and I was totally drawn into their presentation. They were excellent speakers, humorous when they needed to be, and more than knowledgeable on the subject.

For those who don’t know what Ruby and/or Rails are, lemme give a quick explanation. Ruby is another programming language out there (actually scripting language), much like perl. There are many aspects to it that really make it a powerful language, especially the fact that everything is an object, which means that everything has certain methods that can be used directly with it.

Rails (or commonly stated as Ruby on Rails) is a framework to build Web Applications that is based on Ruby. From the tutorial, I learned the basics of building a Rails web app, and it is amazingly simple. In fact, the instructor timed himself and it took 47 seconds to get the basic interface for adding, deleting, and modifying items in a shopping cart, complete with MySQL tables, and all the forms necessary and “backend processing”.

Anywho, it’s dinner time. Just wait for my next update.