http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails Joel Greenberg's Experience in Learning Web Development with Ruby on Rails Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:23:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The story to date: When I picked up Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide, I thought to myself, "OK, I'll just read the tutorial to get what I need and then create my own first website because I know what I want and it's not their example." ... http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/25 Ruby has logic that appears to me...well...logical. I feel there's a "groove" to thinking in Ruby. I'm not able to articulate it further, probably because I'm not that familiar yet with the language. But there's something about the way things work in Ruby that makes sense to ... http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/17 A shout out to Adrian, who left a message on one of my posts encouraging me to keep going with rails. He pointed me to a nice Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet written by a technologist named Pascal. It succinctly lists out commands you'd need to create a Rails ... http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/23 I gave a talk tonight to Bootstrap Austin's web SIG on Second Life. I brought the ad agency where I work into Second Life and am advising clients on the best way to use it. It was a small, but interested group of folks...less than ten. With ... http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/22 After a number of months hiatus, I'm back to learning Ruby, again because I have ideas I want to sketch out in code. If I'm going to be learning a new language anyway, then Ruby seems to give me the most bang for the buck and seems to be ... http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/21 I've found that Rails is really easy to create CRUD. Create/retrieve/update/delete databases is really easy. You set up the database, run a ruby command at the command line, and you get the basic web forms you need to create, list, update, and delete records in a database. ... http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/12 Here are some initial Ruby operators and conventions that tripped me up, hopefully with coherent explanations so they won't trip you up as well. "!" in method names It's a convention that Ruby method names that end in "!" actually change the data. Eg: var1 =[9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, ... http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/6 http://tryruby.hobix.com/ is a nice little, interactive tutorial. It is an IRB session in a web page, with a tutorial you type along with. Nice intro to Ruby. http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/10 So, yesterday I figured out that I could connect to the MySQL database using a different port: 3306. Today, I tried using MySQLFront. Bummer, but I still couldn't connect to a database. I looked for a free MySQL client and found SQL Manager 2005 Lite. That ... http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/9 I ran into my first "bug" the stopped me cold. I define a "bug" as anything that prevents me from moving forward, whether it's code, configuration, poor interface, etc. It's a practical definition based upon the fact that I'm programming to solve a problem, to get something done, and if ... http://joelandkaren.com/learningrails/archives/8