It has been a couple of years since I first dove into Ruby on Rails to build some side projects. However, there’s still an awful lot of magic going on with the framework.

With the release of Rails 4, there seems to be even more magic to make everything easier. Unfortunately, I’ve found myself in a tough spot whenever the magic ceases to work for whatever reason.

Look in to the source? Sure, but unless you’re very strong with your ruby, all the elegant, clever code isn’t exactly an easy read.

Turns out the creator of Thin, Marc-André Cournoyer has a class called Owning Rails that has you building “a mini version of rails from scratch”.

A pretty good deal for a little over $500, considering that you also get a copy of his book Create Your Own Programming Language (The starting point for CoffeeScript).

Unfortunately, the class seems to be limited and full, with a waiting list. I liked the idea of building a mini version of rails – luckily, someone else has a similar take on mastering rails.

Rebuilding Rails covers a similar challenge of building your own simpler framework on Rack to understand the internals of Rails. I went ahead and bought the book after going through the free first two chapters.

Understand Rails by Building a Ruby Web Framework

Gulp! Here’s to less magic!