talks

The question often comes up: do you need to master Ruby in order to use Rails? The short answer is: yes. The longer answer, which will be elaborated in this talk, is: you can get Rails applications up and running with a fairly minimal grasp of Ruby; but mastering Ruby is greatly to your benefit as a Rails developer.

Learning Ruby thoroughly offers at least three major benefits:

1. knowing the actual meaning of what you're doing (as opposed to wondering what the "has_one" in "has_one :engine" actually is, or why you have to stick an at-sign in front of some variable names and not others)

2. knowing how to do more: extending your models programmatically, taking advantage of the ways that Rails is engineered for the enrichment of applications through custom Ruby code (for example, the very existence of a whole directory for "helper" files, in which you're supposed to put your own code)

3. gaining the ability to understand the Rails framework source code, which in turn means that you can participate more meaningfully in discussions, and perhaps even submit patches This talk will expand on each of these points, using specific examples to illustrate and support the general case that Rails developers can, indeed, benefit from a thorough understanding of Ruby techniques and idioms -- even those that are not usually thought of as directly pertaining to Rails programming conventions.