From: Paul Lynch <paul@...>
Date: 2006-09-28T20:16:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Rails for the Rubyist

On 27 Sep 2006, at 16:40, Phrogz wrote:

> Paul Lynch wrote:
>> 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.")

Just for clarity, that quote is from a "Joe Asks" pull out in AWDwR,  
not Ruby for Rails.  Joe being the archetypal newbie programmer.  I  
think that's excusable, until we find the perfect text for explaining  
OOP and MVC; if anyone knows of it, I'd love to hear from you.

Paul