From: Phrogz <gavin@...>
Date: 2006-09-28T00:40:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Rails for the Rubyist

Paul Lynch wrote:
> On 26 Sep 2006, at 00:10, Phrogz wrote:
>
> > What's the best source for the opposite? Learning Rails for those who
> > already know Ruby? I'm frustrated by the number of intro tutorials to
> > rails that have things like "I learned that @foo is called an
> > 'instance variable'".
[snip]
> Agile Web Development with Rails (2nd Ed) is going to be your answer,
> but I think you'd enjoy Ruby for Rails, too; I know I did.

I just bought the PDF, and I'm not very far into it, but I've already
found this section:

"In the description of views and controllers, we showed the controller
setting the
time to be displayed into an instance variable. The .rhtml file used
that instance
variable to substitute in the current time. But the instance data of
the controller
object is private to that object. How does ERb get hold of this private
data to
use in the template?

The answer is both simple and subtle. Rails does some Ruby magic so
that
the instance variables of the controller object are injected into the
template
object. As a consequence, the view template can access any instance
variables
set in the controller as if they were its own.

Some folks press the point: "just how do these variables get set?"
These folks
clearly don't believe in magic. Avoid spending Christmas with them."

Very amusing, but exactly the sort of explanation and attitude that I
was hoping to avoid. Ah well; certainly other good information in it so
far. (I'm also discouraged by the appearance that the book takes the
track of "If you use an RDBMS other than MySQL, it'll mostly work, but
you're on your own when you run into trouble.")