From: Phillip Gawlowski <cmdjackryan@...>
Date: 2007-04-07T17:39:09+09:00
Subject: Re: A few beginners questions

John Joyce wrote:
> While Rails does let you skip most of the JavaScript and SQL work, you 
> can't do it forever.
> To really understand what you're doing you should learn a little bit of 
> it. You don't have to be an expert at it to use it, but you would be 
> doing yourself a disservice by avoiding those topics. SQL more so than 
> JS. JS is pretty easy if you've done any C / PHP / Perl  type of 
> programming.

Well, it takes a bit pressure off one's learning, that's for sure. It's 
best to tackle areas of knowledge one at a time. The trick is to find 
out which area can come afterwards. And IMHO, while important, SQL and 
database management and data modeling theory can take a backseat, 
especially given ActiveRecord or DBI.

Of course, this turns around if you are going to work a lot with 
databases that go beyond web-applications (which have, comparatively, 
rather simple structures).


I agree those, grabbing SQLite[0] and the respective Ruby gem can only 
help (no need to wrestle with MySQL or Oracle at this point).

[0] http://www.sqlite.org

-- 
Phillip "CynicalRyan" Gawlowski
http://cynicalryan.110mb.com/

Rule of Open-Source Programming #34:

Every successful project will eventually spawn a sub-project