by Robert Pearce

Ruby, coupled with Ruby on Rails, has been the primary driving force in my life for the past six months, and Envy Labs has been there every step of the way. “Rails for Zombies,” my first encounter with Rails, attempted to teach me how to use Rails in a manner similar to how a parent might throw his or her child in the deep end of a pool in order for the child to learn how to swim. Although this method of teaching is frustrating, it is effective. Advanced Rubyists and Railseteers might find its sequel, “Rails Best Practices,” to be a bit elementary in some regards; however, for novices, it introduces new realms of knowledge that are not easily coaxed from textbooks and other online resources, making it an incredibly useful tool.

“Rails Best Practices” comes with a disclaimer which states something along the lines of, “This course is intended for people who have worked through at least two Rails projects.” Even though I do not fall within this category, “Rail Best Practices” allows novices like me to see, learn about, and interact with code that would, in the real world, have had potentially disastrous consequences to employers’ code.

One great example of this interaction with code is the lesson “Enter the Presenters.” Prior to “Rails Best Practices,” presenters were unknown to me; I thought that I was going to be stuck with helpers when I wanted to clean out my controllers’ code. Little did I know that such an efficient alternative existed! Without “Rails Best Practices,” it is unlikely that I would have discovered presenters any time soon and would have most likely persisted in my inefficient ways.

Even though “Rails Best Practices” is a useful resource for learning Ruby on Rails, it should not be considered a panacea in a novice’s e-quest for knowledge. Novices should view the course as a resource from which they can extract a number of useful tools for writing maintainable code, yet they should use it, at first, mostly as guidelines to what they should be learning more about.

Robert Pearce

Jack Russell Software, LLC.

May 9, 2011