for developers the best learning materials are third party tutorials

It has always surprised me in the past that the best learning materials for any language or development technology are written by those who didn’t build the technology. The best book for learning C++ way back in the early days was not either of inventor Bjarne Stroustrup’s early books. It was Lippman’s excellent C++ primer. For years the best books on learning either Rails or Ruby were written by Dave Thomas (Agile Web Development in Rails and Programming Ruby) who didn’t have much to with developing either of the two technologies (although he did write the first version of RDoc). And in our opinion, his book was surpassed by later authors such as Fulton’s excellent The Ruby Way.

The same is true for Rhodes. We were pretty happy with our tutorial. And we work pretty diligently to keep it current and accurate at all times. We’ve gotten a lot of kudos from developer users that its pretty good. But, lo and behold, we’ve been one-upped by one of our users, Makoto (who is working on a Mobile Twitter app that is available on GitHub). Check out his blog. Its devoted to “Ruby on mobile”, which as far as I know right now is basically just our technology. The first two articles very nicely summarize the development process with RhoSync and Rhodes, better than we did in the tutorial.