This past fall I began researching web frameworks for an application we’re working on. I spent a couple of months casually researching and trying out every option from Pylons, to Django, to ASP.Net, to Struts, to Ruby on Rails. In the end I settled on using Ruby on Rails, not out of any technical superiority of the framework or language, but because of the great training materials available and the community momentum behind it. Starting in November, I began studying Ruby on Rails in earnest and shortly thereafter began preliminary work on our new project. Along the way, I have tried a lot of different tools and techniques for using and learning Rails. Somethings have been really helpful, other things not so much. What follows is a quick itemization of the things I have found to be most valuable and the things that I wouldn’t recommend other newcomers waster their time on. Read the rest of this entry »