Today I ordered the book Agile Web Development with Rails, a book that explains how to use the Ruby on Rails (aka RoR) web development system based around the Ruby programming language. I've been keeping an eye on it for the past few months as its been getting more and more media coverage (ok, geek media coverage) and this past week I finally started looking at it. What I saw struck me as pretty awesome. The whole premise of Ruby on Rails (RoR) is to make web application development easy especially the initial stages of creating a basic set of pages to insert & update your database, and from there it expands quite gracefully.

One of the really neat things about RoR is that it forces you to adhere to good programming standards, to do everything in a clean MVC structure, which will ultimately make it easier to manage long term. One of the reasons I'm getting into it is the simple fact that learning it will help me learn object oriented programming, something I've had a hard time grasping so far - RoR builds the framework using OOP methodologies so I can see where verything goes as I'm building something, thus start to see how things should be done.

RoR is a very new technology that was launched only about a year ago and in fact has not fully reached the wonderful "version 1.0" point (should be any day now), so this book which was published in July will only take me so far, once I learn the knowledge it has I'll be able to branch out to the latest updates and continue from there. If you're interested in taking a look yourself there's lots of good stuff on the main RoR site including a 15 minute introductory video that shows in the 15 minutes how to build a basic database driven website, itself an awesome feat!