On Ruby: Win Books By Blogging

On Ruby: Win Books By Blogging

Apparently, there is a competition to write a blog entry on how Ruby on Rails has made me a better programmer. Well, on how it has made the person writing the blog entry a better programmer. So yeah, I thought, why not!

I think my thoughts in my other posts so far give some indication of how it's making me a better programmer. And future posts will probably do the same. There are obvious things that Rails has made me do. Thinking in MVC terms - refactoring to the model and keeping styling to the view. Using testing - something I'd never come across back when I "learnt how to program" many years ago. Trying to write RESTfully. It's really made me think about what I'm doing, rather than throw things together. I think that's the most important thing. I'm planning ahead so that I can fully use the advantages that Rails has to offer me.

But let's go back in time a few months to when I first started learning about Rails. I read the Ruby for Rails book from cover to cover and then I took the object-oriented approach to an Access/VBA application I was having to work on. With a little help from a tutorial on OO-Access I wrote CRUD interfaces for all the tables of the database that I had to access. This made most of the Access forms free of any database searching or SQL as the CRUD interface did it for me. There are one or two queries because I couldn't implement relationships as I'd like in VBA (or at least, not with my limited VBA knowledge). But that's it. My application is a lot cleaner and faster and easier to understand than the mammoth database that my predecessor wrote.

And that's how RoR has really made me a better programmer. It's made me think about how I can use these fantastic concepts - CRUD and DRY and many more I'm sure - in other, lesser, programming languages.

(Taken from my Rails blog at http://typo.draigwen.com