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I really came to the conclusion, where I think Ruby+RoR is a big fat hype; it doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in the language itself (which I find pretty entertaining) but so far this is a very mixed bag.

• All I hear is that Ruby is nothing new, yet their developer community is terribly fragmanted and finding really good and working tutorials (not five minute teaser screencasts or transscripts that were written for RoR 1.x) is hard.
• I’m developing on Windows, because now I want to use Windows (I do know what Linux is, can hack the hell out of it, but now I’m not in the mood) and the Ruby Windows experience is a joke. Come on people, Lighttpd fastcgi is nonexistent, Mongrel and Webrick are really not my cup of tea (and I really don’t like restarting the “server” for this and that, it feels like java you know) and the not-so-well-known thingie, called Apache is not very usable either.
• Evangelists everywhere: use Textmate, buy Textmate, buy e-TextEditor use this magical incantation and your install will work! Repeat this mysterious word after me and your install will be 20% percent faster! Just learn a little bit of PR work from Microsoft, not from Apple, okay?
• Gems suck. I mean I have to have a gem for parsing up one lousy template, let it be erb or anything special – now come and argue with me that this is a language for web development! Btw even if I decide to include the stock erb library, it warns me about “performance issues” in the documentation; how cool is that?
• More gem troubles: compilation, installation, dependencies. I know, it works for everyone else, but if you can’t even make a lousy sqlite install work out of the box, then create an installer that works. I don’t care if it is lighttpd+fastcgi or Apache+modruby, but now even finding a compiled eruby.exe is a pain in the back.
• If everything is an object and fully dynamic, don’t be surprised that the language itself is not that fast (creating totally useless benchmarks like this is just self gratification with group psychology) and that no editor exists that can give code completion (the ones trying usually failed for me) – it’s just how it’s meant to be.

Are you a ruby man? Don’t even bother with replying how everything works for you; I’m utterly tired of the opensource answers, like it works for me, or how I suck. Same stuff for all the almighty Linux distros (especially the elitist ones), but that’s going to be another post :)

While have not yet decided whether it is worthwile to invest in Ruby, or to be exact in RoR, or not, I’d like to see what all the hype is all about. Have seen the intro videos on the RoR site long ago, but apart from a remarkable orm implementation and many premade generator scripts it was not really my cup of tea.

Now that a small meetup will be held soon in my city, I’d rather look into the RoR effect, but where to find good tutorials? The community seems to be awfully fragmantated :( Blogs with cool ideas, small yet unfinished tutorials here and there, almighty ror gods speaking from high above…

I tried the Agile Web Development with Rails book, but that’s for RoR 1.2 and some of the examples are broken of course (the 3rd edition is in the making, but I’d rather not buy it – should there be a usable and friendly wiki, I’d live happily ever after); also the railscasts site, but that’s not for total beginners, Poignant’s guide to Ruby, which is cute, but way too verbose for me, and Buildingwebapps, which is a mixed bag: podcasts for programming is pretty silly, yet their screencasts seem to be fine, except for the fact, that they are huge, are in Quicktime movs, lag badly and are jerky – but the content seems to be good, so I’ll stick to them for starting.