Comments on: Django vs Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition

By: Mir Nazim

Mir Nazim — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:26:55 +0000

Who needs books when you have Official Docs + Django Book + django-users + #django

Plus its Python. That’s the BIGGEST +

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 03:25:10 +0000

There’s no need for all these Django books, except the Pro Django one.

By: Aron Pilhofer

Aron Pilhofer — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:40:20 +0000

Wowee… well I hope the “why this matters” post concludes that it doesn’t, cuz this is just silly.

I’m a Rails guy, and this post just made me shrug. If the number of books (good, bad or somewhere in between) made any darn difference, we’d all be hacking Java or .NET.

Rails has more books, bigger conferences… big deal. Python/Django has appengine, Guido + google… again, big honkin’ deal.

Can’t we all just get along? Christ.

By: Peter Harkins

Peter Harkins — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:49:11 +0000

rabble: Which books do you object to?

By: rabble

rabble — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:13:44 +0000

4 of those books under rails have nothing to do with Ruby on Rails. One even isn’t about Ruby!

By: Open Source Communities - Push cx

Open Source Communities - Push cx — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:29:13 +0000

[...] yesterday I posted about the difference in books with a ridiculous title. The difference between eight books and dozens can’t be explained [...]

By: Rock Howard

Rock Howard — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:37:57 +0000

For those who have not seen the Newman title (Django 1.0 Template Development) I am about 1/2 way through it and so far I like it. It is aimed at Django developers (as opposed to template maintainers) and even the intro chapters included tidbits I didn’t know despite the fact that I own 4 other Django books and have used Django since 2005. Tentatively recommended.

By: Peter Harkins

Peter Harkins — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:38:59 +0000

Thanks, AceGopher. Fixed it.

Jonesy: Hopefully it’s funny in many ways. :)

By: Caiwangqin

Caiwangqin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:11:07 +0000

here is ruby/rails books vs java books picture in 2006:
http://www.caiwangqin.com/uploaded_images/JAVAvsRubyRails-734787.jpg

By: Jonesy

Jonesy — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:29:18 +0000

Wow…looking closer at the books makes it even worse.

You need to include all the Python books if you include a single Ruby book (that would weaken the argument, of course).

By: Jonesy

Jonesy — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:27:32 +0000

This is funny considering the ruby/rails people were touting the one book available for rails at the time as a benefit when compared to java. Oh well, no one ever accused the rails folks of making sense ;)

By: AceGopher

AceGopher — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:02:13 +0000

There’s also two covers of “Professional Ruby on Rails”.

By: Peter Harkins

Peter Harkins — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:58:58 +0000

huxley: RESTful Web Services has an example project and lots of demo code in Rails. I included it because I thought it interesting in taking Rails and using it to build a more general-topic book on.

Raymond: Thanks for reading it in the spirit it was intended. But all the Rails books are indeed about Rails.

By: Peter Harkins

Peter Harkins — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:04:39 +0000

Adomas: Thanks, I removed the dupe.

By: Raymond T. Hightower

Raymond T. Hightower — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:04:13 +0000

To be fair, you might want to include Python books in the Django section since you’ve included Ruby books in the Rails section. Or you can achieve balanced by omitting the Ruby books.

Second, it’s more important to use the right tool for a given job. Is a hammer better than a screwdriver? It depends on whether… you get the point.

Finally: number_of-books != measure_of_excellence. I know that you’re only doing a humorous comparison here, and I’m looking forward to a more detailed post tomorrow.

By: huxley

huxley — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:59:06 +0000

Interested to see where you take this but just to fulfill my nitpicky requirement, RESTful Web Services isn’t a Rails book (maybe the fact that Sam Ruby works on Rails threw you off)

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:36:57 +0000

Ruby Quickly doesn’t exist. The book got canned.

By: Gumnos

Gumnos — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 23:53:23 +0000

Looks to me like Django is so easy it can get by with just a couple books — RoR is sufficiently difficult that it needs a whole shelf worth of books.

Or maybe Django presupposes Python knowledge where RoR needs to teach Ruby concurrently?

By: Travis Jeffery

Travis Jeffery — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 23:19:12 +0000

The only thing that jumps out at me is that Rails people are trying to take the passive-aggressive bullshit that goes on in-house and bring it over to Django.

By: Dave Smith

Dave Smith — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 23:00:55 +0000

One challenge for would-be Django authors is the need to figure out some way to add value to Django’s excellent on-line tutorial and documentation.

The other thing that doesn’t show in the list above is the high level of duplication in the Rails books. Many spend a lot of page count covering the same basic material. Once you’ve read Agile Web Development with Rails, the incremental value of many of those others isn’t very high. (With some exceptions: E.g., Ajax on Rails has some excellent coverage of security issues, and the Recipes are useful for some specific problems.) Factor out the duplication, and the page count on the Rails list would shrink considerably.