Apple Posts YART*
Apple posts a Rails tutorial (yet another one!) and I'm becoming ever more curious as to why the Rails community has taken a tutorial-based approach to teaching Rails.
Tutorials are nice for getting down the basics, but they are of limited utility once you start modifying the application to suit your own needs or start creating your own from scratch. When I started learning Rails, I read the OnLAMP tutorial and the others out there to get an idea of what I was doing, but now that I do know how to create links to actions, and how to render partials and what goes in where under the MVC paradigm, but there's very little out there for the intermediate-level developer like myself.
It seems like my only resource is the lackluster Rails wiki which is a mashup (and not the good kind) of half-baked tutorials and a discussion board and the Rails API, which I've only now started to get the hang of but still feels inadequate for solving algorithmic questions ("How do I go about doing X?" rather than "What's the syntax for Y?").
So while I'm having a lot of fun developing in Rails, I do run into some roadblocks where I spend an hour debugging a NoMethodFound error or why my records aren't cascade deleting.
The tutorials do a great job of "showing us how to fish", but after that, it seems like we're dropped into the middle of the ocean instead of letting us row from shore at our own pace.
One other thing I should mention: The Ruby on Rails Podcast has lots of great interviews with prominent figures in the Rails community. It's helped me get a better "big picture" view of Rails and exposed me to some existing Rails projects that are out there, so if you're interesting in that kind of stuff I urge you to check it out.
*Yet Another Rails Tutorial
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