Started Reading, "Agile Web Development with Rails"

I've read the first two chapters, "Introduction" and "The Architecture of Rails Applications", and the appendix, "Introduction to Ruby".

(...With my limited reading...) I'm a little scared of Ruby's, "you can write the same thing a few different ways" power. I get a little intimidated when I see stuff like this:

The following lines are equivalent.

puts say_goodnight("John-Boy")
puts(say_goodnight("John-Boy"))

I have a feeling it's this type of behavior that allows Ruby code to be more human readable (i.e. looks like commands instead of function/method calls). I've never liked situations where there is more than 1 way to do something. But that's just me.

(....Again with my limited reading....) I'm very impressed with the Rails MVC framework. The way the first "directory" in the URL maps to controller, and the next directory maps to a method call is very nice. I believe Spring MVC has a similiar style of controller (my memory fails me as to what it's called), but Spring MVC is a big, sophisticated framework based on lots of configuration with a bunch of Spring MVC controller object types. (All the controller objects extend from a base class, of course.). So far what I like about Rails is that I'm not really given a choice as to what type of controller object I'm using. It appears (at this point) that it only has one style.

I really do like Spring MVC! It was my first look at what I consider a REAL "MVC" framework. If you have to develop in Java/JSP I highly recommend it!

The (seemingly) pure MVC framework that Rails provides coupled with the (seemingly) integrated ORM framework, ActiveRecord, looks to be a very natural path to writing less code while accomplishing a lot. (I say seemingly because I haven't written any Ruby on Rails apps or code yet.)

Writing less code is good.

Rod Johnson, the inventor of the Spring Framework and someone I really respect, said in a presentation that he enjoys writing less code. The next thing he said was, "I never have to debug code that isn't written." (Or something like that. :) )

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this book, and working with the sample app. The (main) author of this book, Dave Thomas, was at the conference I attended earlier this year. Dave is a phenomenal speaker, and the entire time I was reading this book I kept hearing his calming English accent. (The way he paces his voice while speaking makes everything he says sound incredibly intelligent. :) ) Dave also had pretty close access to the creator of the Rails framework, David Heinemeier Hansson. So even as other Ruby on Rails books are published this one should be the gold standard the others are measured against.