I received to books in the mail the other day: Agile Web Development with Rails and The C Programming Language (aka K&R).

I am starting a project at work using Ruby on Rails, whose goal is to facilitate rapid development of database-backed web applications. It automatically generates the guts of a webapp (provided certain naming conventions are followed), allowing the developer to focus on the application logic. Things like wiring together models, views and controllers and the the mapping between business objects and database tables are automatic. Rails even promises to optimize for programmer happiness, a bold claim.

Jobster is written on a Spring + Hibernate + Oracle platform which is really powerful, but complicated. We often use rails for prototypes and side projects where rapid development is highly valued.

But I miss system programming. Instead of piecing together handfuls of other technologies and dealing with abstractions, you interact directly with the OS with a simple programming language and a small set of libraries. You aren’t dependant on magic black boxes that do most of the work. It is all you for better or worse.

It will be fun contrasting my high-level rails work with whatever pet C projects I come up with.