[thejteam]

Is your target audience absolute beginners to programming or experienced programmers who want to learn Rails?

One thing I Have never seen is a "why" you should learn Rails and what you can do with it. What kind of web apps can I build? What can I do with it? Why would I want to?

Personally, I don't go for the informal tone, but it wasn't over the top and many books tend to go that way so no problem.

I like that it seems you won't be preaching about side technologies like git or tdd. It is an added difficulty when people add extra complications to a book, especially an intro level book. My personal opinion, don't go preachy on formatting or style either, just use well written examples for people to learn from and they will pick up your style.

[AstonJ]

Thanks for your feedback.

> Is your target audience absolute beginners to programming or experienced programmers who want to learn Rails?

Definitely more the former. Although I do assume the reader is familiar with the basics of HTML and CSS given that Rails is a web framework, but neither of those should be difficult to pick up.

I like the idea of including something on 'why' Ruby and hope to tackle those when I come to the Ruby chapter - I should also touch on reasons for choosing Rails in the introduction to Rails chapters. The reason I didn't include any of that in the initial chapters is because I am assuming people have already made their mind up in giving Rails a go - but definitely see your point and maybe I could add a note to say that is covered in the later chapters?

Thanks again for your feedback - much appreciated!

[excid3]

I had similar thoughts on this. A lot of people express interest in learning how to program. The problem is that the majority of things out there are don't explain why, and choosing which language or framework to use ends up being a flip of a coin.

I know this is how I chose to start programming in Python back in the day. More or less flipped a coin between it and Ruby because there wasn't anything I could find that explained why one might be better or worse for what I wanted to accomplish.

[AstonJ]

Yes it can be tough - I agonised over Python and Ruby too, there was a lot going for them both, but in the end I followed my heart as I just felt more comfortable with Ruby :)

Thanks for the comment!