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Ruby

John Fisher
John Fisher
7,974 Points
Posted by John Fisher
John Fisher
7,974 Points

Learn Sinatra before Rails?

I plan to learn Rails once I feel comfortable with Ruby. I read on a couple of forums some people saying that it's a good idea to learn something called Sinatra (which is a framework I believe?) before learning Rails because it stand you in good stead for when you eventually do come to learn Rails.

Is this good advice, or would it just be a waste of time I could be spending actually trying to learn Rails? Is anyone here familiar with Sinatra?

thanks

3 Answers

David Clausen
David Clausen
11,403 Points
David Clausen
David Clausen
11,403 Points

This site and many others have you going from Ruby to Rails. In fact rails was built to simplify web deployment and development. Similar goals of Sinatra. I would never say learning something is a waste of time. If your goal is rails then it would be a temporary distraction.

Raymond Sapida
Raymond Sapida
33,049 Points
Raymond Sapida
Raymond Sapida
33,049 Points

I think either way is good depending on how you typically learn a subject, top-down or bottom-up. Sinatra is a great way to start if you need to know how the framework works because it's a much smaller codebase to go through. I started out with Rails though because I wanted to be as productive as possible to motivate myself when I was going through Treehouse's Ruby on Rails track.

If you do decide to learn Sinatra, Jumpstart Lab has two tutorials you could go through called IdeaBox and WebGuesser. Both helped me out a lot when I tried learning it.

John Fisher
John Fisher
7,974 Points
John Fisher
John Fisher
7,974 Points

Thanks for the answers, both of you.

I will look into Sinatra a bit more and see how I feel before diving in.