I just came across Starting Ruby on Rails: What I Wish I Knew in which Kalid Azid summarizes what to expect from Rails and its relatives, including Rake, IRB, and YAML. Also mentioned are various Ruby-isms and Rails-isms that often elude the novice developer.
Ruby on Rails is an elegant, compact and fun way to build web applications. Unfortunately, many gotchas await the new programmer. Now that I have a few rails projects under my belt, here’s my shot at sparing you the suffering I experienced when first getting started.
This is the exact question I asked myself while writing Beginning Rails: what do you wish you’d known when you first started out. So, if you’re reading the book and are wishing for a concise summary of some of the various gotchas, do yourself a favor and read Kalid’s article.
