I used Sinatra as my learning tool for getting into Ruby instead of Rails. Rails was frankly daunting. I had never done web programming, only some C in high school. I didn't like that typing 'script/generate' threw up 46 files, each with their own purpose and use. Even with books and tutorials I didn't quite know where to start, or how to do what I wanted to do instead of what the tutorial wanted me to do.
Sinatra was great however. Everything (by default, I realize you can move beyond this) was in a single file that I could glance at, find my errors and correct. The downside mainly was that when looking for help I kept finding Rails-specific stuff, which wasn't useful (trying looking up Ruby stuff without encountering Rails, or accidentally filtering every decent page out of search). The documentation for Sinatra could certainly be improved and I'd love to see a book on it.
One of the first Sinatra tutorials you used to run across on Google (was on http://www.xnot.org/ but is now removed) didn't work with current versions of Sinatra and produced very odd errors. Slightly frustrating to a noob when the documentation isn't marked with a date or the fact that it was only to the alpha versions.
Overall Sinatra is amazing for bashing out really quick and simple web interfaces in about 10 minutes. Rails is just too heavy oftentimes. I might just need to make a page that allows someone to see something that Ruby is pulling from a database- and that's it!
Sinatra was great however. Everything (by default, I realize you can move beyond this) was in a single file that I could glance at, find my errors and correct. The downside mainly was that when looking for help I kept finding Rails-specific stuff, which wasn't useful (trying looking up Ruby stuff without encountering Rails, or accidentally filtering every decent page out of search). The documentation for Sinatra could certainly be improved and I'd love to see a book on it.
One of the first Sinatra tutorials you used to run across on Google (was on http://www.xnot.org/ but is now removed) didn't work with current versions of Sinatra and produced very odd errors. Slightly frustrating to a noob when the documentation isn't marked with a date or the fact that it was only to the alpha versions.
Overall Sinatra is amazing for bashing out really quick and simple web interfaces in about 10 minutes. Rails is just too heavy oftentimes. I might just need to make a page that allows someone to see something that Ruby is pulling from a database- and that's it!