2008-06-17 Not Good For A Beginner To Programming

I'm an experienced developer in HTML and CSS so I thought I'd try my hand at my first real programming and hop on the latest band wagon of Ruby on Rails.

I boldy read my way through Chapters 1 and 2, having to refer to the web for definitions on acronyms I didn't know and re-read some of the particularly jargon-filled paragraphs that made assumptions about what I already knew thinking "Ok, it seems a bit tricky, but I understand the concepts so I'm sure I'll get the hang of it once I hit the real examples." I didn't even get to the real examples.

The installation section is a real let-down. Using Mac OS Leopard, I am informed that I have all of the tools, I just need to enable them, where it then tells me to go on a load of web sites to look up how to do this. Totally unhelpful. I'm sure that seasoned programmers know how to set up their particular environments and that using Ruby on Rails is just some small tweaks to their command lines and off they go, but I was left um-ing and argh-ing as I downloaded tool after tool and followed online tutorial after online tutorial trying to work out what the hell I was supposed to be doing.

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but I assumed that by buying a rather pricey book that you'd get all the info in the book, rather than having to rummage around the web, and maybe the tools should be included on a disc or to download from a dedicated web site or something?

Needless to say, I gave up and have bought Sitepoint's 'Simply Rails 2.' Having read a lot of Sitepoint books in the past, I'm hoping that this will live up to their standards- I'll post a review to that when I'm a bit further in!