Preface

I remember when I created my first true website—it was called The U2 Shack, and, as the name suggests, it was a site dedicated to the band U2. This was back in 1998, and it was handwritten with Windows Notepad in straight HTML. The site was hosted on GeoCities and was part of a link ring. It took forever to update because it was all hardcoded HTML, but it was mine and I was proud of it.

Fast forward about three years, and I was introduced to Perl and then PHP. I was amazed that the server could process variables given to it by the web browser and spit out custom-built HTML based on the user’s request. For example, one fun site I made in those early days was a word-search generator. The user could input a list of words they wanted to be in a puzzle, as well as the width and height and whether to allow some words to be hidden backwards. The server would take all this information, brute-force a custom word-search puzzle, and output it in HTML for the user to print.

I happily developed sites with PHP for years, and then Ruby on Rails dropped. Like many developers of the time, I was amazed at a video of the Rails author creating a fully functional blog engine in 10 minutes. I was sold. Almost instantly, I switched over to learning Ruby and developing websites with Ruby on Rails. I had tolerated Perl and PHP but fell in love with Ruby in 2005. For over a decade, Ruby and Ruby on Rails were my tools of choice, and I still use them every day.