[wtallis]

"Best way to learn" seems too vague to have a productive conversation about. If your goal is to become proficient with a framework, then reading the docs top to bottom is probably a great thing to do, but if you merely want to hack together a one-off project over a weekend then it's probably not worth investing the time to exhaustively learn about all the features and paradigms of that framework.

[jmondi]

Did you learn English by reading the dictionary top to bottom? I’m gonna go ahead and guess that no, you didn’t. You learned English by being surrounded in it and practicing.

[wtallis]

You're being strangely combative in this thread, as though you are personally offended by something. What's your problem, and why are you letting it drive you to make such weak arguments? Do you have some past trauma related to being forced to read, or is it just bad experiences with Rails specifically?

It really doesn't take more than a few seconds to figure out why your analogy of learning a language by reading a dictionary written in that language is both stupid and inapplicable here, so I'm not going to try to further address that aspect of your comment (especially since you don't seem inclined to directly respond to anything in my comment).

[jmondi]

You’re right, I apologize. You are right that my analogy is stupid on a bunch of different levels.

I’ve been surrounded by so many rails fans who use it for every possible problem. “If all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail” was the epitome of what was happening. Then being left with trying to sift through old versions of documentation, trying to figure out what is the “current” way of doing things in rails vs the previous ways, aye yi yi. Rails has definitely left me with a sour taste in my mouth.

I’m not saying rails is bad, it is great in so many situations. I’m just saying it is not a silver bullet, and the cult behind it has some real blinders on.

I stand by my original argument though that for most people, reading documentation top to bottom isn’t the best way to learn. If it works for you, great.

[4m1rk]

People who throw Rails at any problem, either have not maintained a Rails project for long enough or they don't know any other alternative tech.

[mirekrusin]

Programming language is not natural language, think more how did you learn math?

[bluefirebrand]

By having stuff demonstrated by a teacher and then repeatedly solving small problems.

Not once did I read a textbook front to back.

[oblio]

And obviously, talking to classmates. Let's not forget the social aspects of learning.