[LRUG] another beginner.. ruby but not rails

[graham]

Hi,

This isn't so much of a question as a comment and wonder whether other 
beginners are running into the same thing...

Rails is all very nice, but the idea of starting with a complex 
framework and a new language both at once seemed a bit much (how do you 
know if your problems are due to language or framework?). So I thought: 
start with a project to get used to the language, then when I'm happy 
with the syntax, available libraries etc move onto rails. This seems 
straightforward, until you do hit problems - when you discover that ruby 
documentation resources seem to be becoming completely dominated by 
Rails, and anything about Ruby itself (in a web context, not the pure 
language) seems to be quite old and limited. For example, there seems to 
be very little about eRuby (compared with for example the amount of 
on-line documentation about mod_perl). I keep running into problems in 
understanding how the language's scope rules interact with the web 
context, or getting a feel for what would be good practice in a web - 
but not rails - context, and finding that googling and books both give 
me a very limited amount of information.

How do people feel about this? Is it a case of 'if you want to use ruby 
on the web you're wasting your energy not using Rails'? Or do I just 
need to refine my google skills? or just bring some code to the next 
ruby meet ;-) ?

Cheers
Graham