Learn Ruby and Rails

Looks like Ruby is exciting!!!

I wouldn’t say i’m an expert by any stretch of the imagination but i’ve got my RoR app up and running.
It’s been live for the last 2 months and all is going smoothly so far =)

I first tried picking up Ruby / Rails last September, whilst following the numerous guides and tutorials was good I never actually learnt much from it.
Nonetheless I saw how productive this can make application development and was impressed!

I’ve revisited it this year over the last couple of weeks and its coming along nicely.
It’s certainly a lot easier to pick something up if you have a project to work on rather than follow step-by-step guides.
To begin with, I was getting pretty frustrated as most of my coding is done on the commute to and from work thus sans-internet so when I get stuck I get stuck.
The more I have stuck at it the more success I have had, whilst I’m sure my code is probably pretty crappy the application is ACTUALLY working! It’s a great feeling of accomplishment when I crack a problem i’ve been staring at for a while.
I’ve also found ‘the zone’, for example I was on such a roll yesterday I found myself up until 3am tweaking.

I’ve got a long way to go before I could call myself even competent but there is definately progress :)

RoR is a fantastic and easy framework to learn. Not to mention very forgiving! I still have loads to learn, however, I’m amazed how productive you can become in a short amount of time.

I wrote a fax management app for the company that I work for. I’ve now moved into the engineering department developing Java applications.

I’m still pursuing RoR after hours, I’m busy putting together a community portal which I’d like to launch sometime this year.

Stay tuned!

My ISP doesn’t support it, so I can’t test it in practise, which makes it pointless to learn right now.

Yet another programming language I want to learn. I’ve heard lots about Ruby and how powerful it is, so now is the time to find out.

be planning to do this one for a long time! how’s this for luck… i get a copy of Programming Ruby 2nd Ed, and then a few weeks later, i get heldup at gunpoint outside my house. my laptop with bag and Programmin Ruby 2n Ed gone! wimper

anyhow, the strong shall prevail… so i bought another copy, along with a PDF copy, so here we go. i’ve got some cool project ideas for my Ruby adventure… i’m also going to be replacing Bash with Ruby… and try and be a more productive sysadmin. ;)

It’s just too damn hard. It’ll have to wait until I find a good guide, I hate learning it all from bits and pieces of information. That’s just wasting time.

Rails is a bliss, I’ve tried it (did the todo-list example) and it works just fine. Then the downside: my ISP doesn’t support Ruby. Anything I do, will stay on my PowerBook…

I like programming. Most of the programming I do is web apps. I don’t like doing the basic web app stuff of SQL data entry and form handling. Perhaps Rails would help me get rid of that and focus on the things that matter?