Learning Ruby on Rails

I am not going to lie, I have been getting downbeat about this learning to code project.  It is not so much that I feel overwhelmed by the topic, but just that I cannot devote the extended blocks of time I need to cement the knowledge I am picking up from books and tutorials.  

I finished Michael Hartl's railstutorial.org, which is just fabulous and I would recommend this to anyone who is learning rails.  I then started my first rails project, a Kanban board that I could use at work, using Agile Zen (www.agilezen.com) as my template.  I thought this would be a good place to start as I could use it at work, and I cared about the project, so it wasn't just completely academical.  However I just hit the limits of my knowledge, I got so far basically just following the Rails Tutorial again, and changing it to fit the new project, but as soon as I wanted to do something new I was paralyzed.  Without a guide in front of me I froze.  I just couldn't construct code fron scratch because I just didn't understand the Ruby language well enough.  You can see this project on GitHub, not that it is much to look at: https://github.com/tatterzig96/kanban_me

So after a few weeks of brooding over this I read this article http://innonate.com/hope/ and started to feel energized again.  This guy understood the difficulty of learning to code, and the primary problem was that he was only spending a few stolen hours a week as opposed to good block of time.  So he created the sweat lodge approach and was more successful.  Unfortunately as a full-time employee and father of a 2 year old, I don't have that luxury.  However it did give me a reason I could hang my failure on.  I just cannot devote a solid 40 hours to cementing this knowledge, so it will take me longer.  However I refute the claim that it is impossible at a few hours a week.

So I started learning again.  I felt like I really needed to fundamentally understand Ruby as a language, and not just in the context of Rails.  So I bought Beginning Ruby from Apress and ploughed my way through that over the course of a month.  This was really helpful, and I now have a Ruby reference book to turn to, and can think to myself, is this an array or hash for example.  I then worked through the Ruby Koans which I used as a practical way to apply what I learned in the book.  These are very helpful mostly because they forced me to pick up the Ruby book again and review each section for each Koan.

So I am starting again.  I am going to try and either complete the Kanban project I started, or a new project idea that would again be useful for my job, the ability to upload new stories to Agile Zen using excel.  This involves file manipulation and API calls, so I am not sure that is such a great first project, but I will try anyway.  I see someone has created a Ruby gem for the Agile Zen API (http://rubygems.org/gems/agilezen), so that has got to help right? 

So I have been working my way through Michael Hartl's excellent ebook, but I started to struggle with continuity.  My life is fairly hectic, and in between looking after my 2 year old, working full-time and visiting family in England, Kansas City and Washington DC these last 3 months, I find it very difficult to devote a good couple of hours to the Ruby on Rails examples at the end of the day.  This has meant I started to feel very disjointed from the learning process, and more confused as I jump in and out of the chapters.  

Then I stumbled across Envy Labs' excellent Rails for Zombies (http://www.codeschool.com/courses/rails-for-zombies).  This has enabled me to pick up my enthusiasm for learning to code as I can dive in and start solving problems within 5-10 minutes of hitting to site and watching the videos.  It has helped me consolidate some stuff I learned with Hartl, and got me writing some lines of code.

The author uses a regular expression for email validation:

/\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i

In the tutorial, the author often uses “mate” in the code examples when he needs to edit the code. However I did not buy Text Mate and have used Komodo Edit instead as it is free.

Using this article I created the alias and added it to the .bash_profile.

alias komodo='open -a "Komodo Edit"'

To install Ruby the tutorial author, Michael Hartl, recommended using RVM, which would enable running multiple instances of Ruby with different version names.

However after installing RVM I needed to add some code to the .bash_profile, a file which I did not have.

This was the article that saved the day:

This was one of the first errors I came across during the installation and set up phase of the tutorial.  It turns out there is a Developers package that comes with OS X which you need to install before you do anything (I told you I was a programming noob!)

So I just used the DVD that came with my iMac, but you can also download and install the package you need from here:

Tony Schwartz, http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/08/six-keys-to-being-excellent-at.html

So the title says it all right. I have made a resolution: Before 2011 is out I will have written and deployed a working, primitive version of a web application. However I am a not a programmer in the slightest. I hang around with programmers all day as part of my job as a Business Analyst / Project Manager on Agile web application development projects, so I am exposed to the jargon and culture. But I don't code.