Last night I decided to take the dive and try building a website in ROR. I had no prior experience, but I did have the new Agile Programming book. And after four hours I have to say I feel like I cheated. I was able to create a fully administrable website, with almost no coding on my part and very little learning curve. It was almost too easy. Anyone else have a similar experience with ROR or any other framework. I tried Django, but I couldn't even get that setup properly, so I gave up on it for now.
I also felt the same way after building a basic app reading along with "Rails Solutions" in two hours. Seems too easy...until you start getting into some meatier applications and use cases. Take a look at some of the tutorials over at peepcode.com. You won't feel like you are cheating any more if you can get through some of those.
And why is that a bad thing :)<p>Some programming languages have us tuned that we have to do all the work ourselves.<p>It's a paradigm mind shift. Rails enables focus on business, not on code (not that it will scale easily though - it will present the same challenges as every other platform).
My biggest issue with rails is that I don't really understand how the thing works. That bugs me. <p>It doesn't matter that I've got a fully functional and beautiful website. It bothers me that most of what's going on is happening is some black hole. <p>To be fair, this is more ruby's fault than rails, as it's a difficult language to parse for my western-aligned and procedural brain.<p>I find django/python much more satisfactory for this reason alone really.