When people ask me how to improve their programming this is my first advice - speed read docs/stdlib top to bottom and keep writing a lot of little things. It’s amazing how many people choose painful path of learning through osmosis.
If you want to make an app from scratch, you must first understand the universe.
This is a ludicrous approach for most. Sure, if you learn from reading and love to read technical manuals, go for it. But to imply this is the best way for most to learn is completely ridiculous.
there are about 35 guides in the rails guide list and half of those are digging deep into the framework... reading the first 10 of them would get you about 95% of what you really need to know in rails so that you can look up stuff later. hell even just doing the getting started guide walks you through a fairly complete rails application.
yah, that's what i did when i first got into rails (~3.0/3.1): read 5-10 of the guides while working through michael hartl's tutorial and reading/watching a number of railscasts (which are dated now, but still have good basic info).
i'm working (slowly) on a personal project in rails 7 using all the hotwire with importmaps newness, and so far, it's been so much better than recent rails' diversion into all that node/yarn/webpacker mess.
I just put all the essential ones through firefox reader mode and the high end of reading them at what is what an average reader can read at based on the word count and it puts it at 10.31 hours of reading. that's a basically complete understanding of rails that most people don't have. to get 80% there you could probably skim most of them and read the main articles on models, views, and controllers and be done in a few hours. (firefox uses a somewhat naive approach though that just counts words and can't distinguish new code vs. the interesting bits so i'd wager the time is less since there is a lot of repetition in code)
it's not a ton of investment compared to how much time it would save you if you use rails later.
"Best way to learn" seems too vague to have a productive conversation about. If your goal is to become proficient with a framework, then reading the docs top to bottom is probably a great thing to do, but if you merely want to hack together a one-off project over a weekend then it's probably not worth investing the time to exhaustively learn about all the features and paradigms of that framework.
Did you learn English by reading the dictionary top to bottom? I’m gonna go ahead and guess that no, you didn’t. You learned English by being surrounded in it and practicing.
You're being strangely combative in this thread, as though you are personally offended by something. What's your problem, and why are you letting it drive you to make such weak arguments? Do you have some past trauma related to being forced to read, or is it just bad experiences with Rails specifically?
It really doesn't take more than a few seconds to figure out why your analogy of learning a language by reading a dictionary written in that language is both stupid and inapplicable here, so I'm not going to try to further address that aspect of your comment (especially since you don't seem inclined to directly respond to anything in my comment).
You’re right, I apologize. You are right that my analogy is stupid on a bunch of different levels.
I’ve been surrounded by so many rails fans who use it for every possible problem. “If all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail” was the epitome of what was happening. Then being left with trying to sift through old versions of documentation, trying to figure out what is the “current” way of doing things in rails vs the previous ways, aye yi yi. Rails has definitely left me with a sour taste in my mouth.
I’m not saying rails is bad, it is great in so many situations. I’m just saying it is not a silver bullet, and the cult behind it has some real blinders on.
I stand by my original argument though that for most people, reading documentation top to bottom isn’t the best way to learn. If it works for you, great.
