Learning Ruby

Back when I started to think about server-side web programming (several years back, now), I thought of picking some nice, modern language to start with. My only previous experience was with Java, during early 2000s when I was still at university, and I wasn't too happy with it.

Ruby seemed to be hot topic (Python too, but I have severe allergic reaction to languages that want to force their way of thinking on me so I ignored that) so I started looking for some tutorials.

What I found:
"Now that you want to build a blog..." And this repeated many times over, in several variants. Granted this was ruby on rails - as an afterthough I guess that latter part somehow indicates that "there is only one way to do this, our way". Yeah, remember what I just said about language forcing their way just before this...

No. I already had a database schema at that point, I just needed to make a front-end for it. For some reason I just couldn't find anything useful that could help me get over this initial starting situation.

I am not happy with "hello, world" approach in learning. When I want to learn something, I usually have an existing problem I want to solve, and I'm giving new tool an option to do it, often learning something useful during the process. Anything that tries to go against this is just a nuisance and will be swept aside.

Of course, considering the level of my expertise in general this means that when I get there the problem I have is rated "pretty damn difficult" already, and web quite often offers very little help, often due to topic being fairly specialized. I end up doing most the learning myself anyway, from scraps and pieces of information littered around. C'est la vie or something like that.

Either way, in this specific case I went with PHP. Many people will hate me for this, but realistically, it was there, close enough to my existing path of thinking, and most importantly, not fighting me when I wanted to get things done. I'm not too happy with uncompiled, dynamic languages in general, but at this point it was the lesser evil.

Passive learning has its advantages too. By the time of this I had read a lot about web programming, just in more general sense. Most common pitfalls, like dangers of unverified and unsecured parameters and so on, so I was able to work around the most dangerous issues with just a few additional searches.

And I still have no idea on how to write any Ruby code. Ah well, maybe one day interesting problem will appear and I'll find some motivation for it.