Railroaded?

(image courtesy of Kino International)

I've just started using Ruby On Rails for developing a pet project.  The reasons for this are multiple:

1. I want to learn a dynamic language.What better one than Ruby as a starter?  The number of online resources for help is just staggering.
2. I want to learn techniques from another successful framework. (FubuMVC really opened my eyes to how much better a .net MVC framework should be, so lets widen the scope further)
3. I simply want to know what all the fuss is about.

 This post is hopefully the first of many, simply observing the nuances, differences in comparison with the .net world and probably an avenue for my frustrations (expletives guaranteed).

 Getting started, I conceded that I would run with the out-of-the-box configuration - I need to learn the Ruby language as well as the framework so I don't want to get bogged down re-configuring it to death before I even get properly up and running.

Out-of-the-box means that Active Record is used for data access. I've never (wittingly) employed the Active Record pattern on any project, but it instantly had me recalling a Chad Myers post  (long, but well worth the read). I didn't agree with everything 100% at the time, and I'm still too green with RoR to make up my mind entirely, but it certainly got me thinking. And if I get nothing else from my RoR exploits then at least I will have been thinking carefully and not just blindly following one single framework.