Sam Danielson

I was writing ListDC in PHP while my shared web host was ranting and raving that they supported the new way to write web software with Ruby on Rails. My PHP code was disgusting so I went looking for alternatives. Using Windows at the time, I downloaded Instant Rails to give it a try.

Ruby on Rails is a sweet framework! Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson wrote a great intro book and Ruby is readable enough that I could figure out what was going on without any prior experience with the language. I won't get all teary eyed and say I love Ruby or anything like that. I will say that Ruby is an excellent tool for the sort of work Rails does and overall I enjoy using the language. It's easy like BASIC yet supports OOP and closures. Methods can become objects with a standard 'call' method and thus passed around like in Javascript, and anonymous methods are supported.

Anyway, I've since switched to the Kubuntu OS because there are so many tools available in Linux. I also dropped my shared host because shared hosting sucks and set up a VPS over at Slicehost. Do you see how I've been affected? Anyone doing web development should get this book.