A while ago I got some advice that I should check out Ruby on Rails. I got the recommended PDF book (and now I can’t remember what it was called) and worked through building an ecommerce site step by step. Problem is, I didn’t know what was going on in each step, so I never got to the point of being able to build a Rails app of my own.
This week I decided to give it another go. Since my first attempt a couple of years ago, I have learnt basic PHP and built a couple of prototypes to test things out. That’s given me a much better understanding of how web applications work, which means I now know what Rails is all about.
Rather than go for a book, this time I decided to find some online tutorials. What I’ve found is that if I follow more than one tutorial then they tend to patch each other’s gaps. What one tutorial doesn’t explain well, the other fills in and vice versa. So I started with the official Getting Started with Rails guide in combination with Code School’s Rails for Zombies. One is a step-by-step, dry and technical, copy-the-code type while the other is a fully-themed-up, dive-right-in video and hands-on gamified lesson series. One has the whole sequence while the other focusses in on small details without the set-up overheads.
To cut a long story short (and leaving out the gore), I am now up and running building my very first Rails application. It’s never going to see the light of day as a public release, but that’s not the point. Now that I get how a framework works and how MVC is supposed to go, a little practice is going a long way towards developing a properly useful skill.