Inspired by the really cool ASP.NET MVC Framework coming out of Microsoft I wanted to at least test the waters with Ruby and Rails for a couple of reasons:
- One, it is apparent that a lot of the inspiration for ASP.NET MVC came from Rails
- Two, many people keep asking me how ASP.NET MVC compares to Rails
I hate not being in the know so I bought a book called, Rails for .NET Developers, with the hopes that it would give me a good and concise overview of Rails that would speak to me with my C# and .NET background.
As luck would have it, I really, really enjoyed Rails for .NET Developers as it provided just the right amount of background on both Ruby and Rails to get me up and started quickly. The key is that I did not want to have to learn the entire Ruby Language, which I knew nothing about, to get started on Rails. I wanted to learn just enough to appreciate and understand what Rails was doing for simple forms-over-data web applications and then, if Rails spoke to me, continue my education on Ruby and Rails. Rails for .NET Developers hit that balance perfectly.
Another cool reason why I liked the book is that it compared and contrasted Ruby with C#. Rails for .NET Developers, for example, would show you how to do something like create an array in C# and then show you how to do it in Ruby. But more importantly, you could see some of the more interesting comparisons like, partial classes and automatically implemented properties, that we just got in C# 3.0 and see how Ruby does it. Really wakes you up a bit as to how excited we get about new language features in C# or VB and see that they are not so new to others :) Of course, we realize C# is borrowing those features from other languages, but it is another thing to experience it :)
If you are an ASP.NET WebForms developers, you will really be excited about the fact that Rails for .NET Developers shows you examples of how you do something in Rails compared to WebForms. You see WebForms and Rails code right next to each other with great explanations. I enjoyed seeing the code immensely, but personally, I would have loved to see the comparisons between Rails and ASP.NET MVC. Now realistically I don't know how well they could have done that since ASP.NET MVC hadn't been released in 1.0 yet when the book was being written, so I can't really fault them on this. It would have just been really cool is all. I suspect we will be seeing books comparing ASP.NET MVC and Rails very soon :)
At the end of the book there are some advanced topics on TDD, BDD, and Integrating Rails with .NET via web services. It is amazing to see how vital and integrated TDD and BDD are in the Rails Community, which you really don't see in the .NET Developer Community. I think this wakes you up a bit, too.
In summary, I loved Rails for .NET Developers. I think it is a great starter book to have for those .NET Developers interested in Rails.
David Hayden