#rails tutorial

I feel like I know the steps to making a web app now but i still have very little understanding of how ruby or anything works, because the tutorial literally tells you what code to write. and i guess that’s probably its purpose, but still. i feel like it would be more helpful in the long run to really understand this stuff.

The Third Edition of Michael Hartl's #Ruby on #Rails Tutorial is Available on @Amazon!

The most widely known way (which is also often described as the best way) to learn Ruby on Rails is the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. Its third edition, which covers Rails 4, has been available as both a digital book and video screencasts for several months on Hartl’s Rails Tutorial website, but was just released in print form yesterday. I received mine from Amazontoday, and was pleased to…

The big thing about account activations was introducing mailers. There’s a fair bit of black magic required for the set up and getting all the config stuff right, but I think I understand whats going in the main parts of the mailers.

The part on password resets SHOULD have been mostly review, but it was actually very difficult for me. The pluralization conventions and the functions that return urls for different actions tripped me up quite a bit. I also misunderstood what assigns(:variable) did in tests and what the variable should refer to. I’m still a bit confused; integration tests aren’t associated with a specific controller, I thought, though convention seems to be to not use a single test to test too many things at once. So how does assigns() know where to get the instance variable from? 

More practice with forms is good, but they’re still a bit opaque to me. I’m not sure why they take the form (ha) that they do. Some of that is they’re part of the HTML/Rails interface, which I’m not as clear on.

The big new things was the BCrypt stuff and session and cookies. The BCrypt stuff is still black magic. I mean, it has to be to some extent; actually covering crypto would be a whole other book. But the way you work with it seems odd and counter-intuitive. In particular, I don’t understand why you test match a match hashed passwords/tokens the way you do. Likewise, the handling of the unhashed token seems strange, and I don’t know why it’s done that way.

The handling of sessions and cookies makes more sense. They seem to be (wrapped in) a fairly straightforward and familiar form, though as always I need practice applying it.

There’s a lot of testing in the chapter. It’s good practice, and I think I’m starting to understand what’s tested and how, particularly for post-hoc tests. I don’t think following a tutorial that tells you what tests to write is good practice for test-driven development, though, and I feel like I’ll need a lot of practice designing my own stuff to get good at that.

First, testing. I get the point of testing. And I understand in general how it's supposed to be done. But the actual syntax of all the different assert variations is black magic. I KNOW what I want to test for (in one case, and more or less in another case), but I don't know HOW to use assert_select (or any other assert) to test for it. I eventually figured out where it told me what to do, the specific syntax for the specific case, but I can't see any rhyme or reason to the syntax that I could use to write my own tests for anything except trivial variations of the same thing.

Which brings me to another point. To call these things "exercises" is stretching the definition. In some cases, its actually just "do this thing, and confirm that it works". That's not an exercise, that's more tutorial (except you have the excuse of an exercise to only explain what "works" actually means in the separate solutions guide). And even when it's not that, there's a lot of very specific exercises where they're almost entirely solved except for a tiny fill-in-the blank (which I tend to ignore initially, and try to write or at least think through the WHOLE solution, but still). 

Forms are another thing that I'm still struggling with, but I think I'm in better shape there than on the various assert methods and testing. I think practice is what's needed there.

Flash is in similar situation. Maybe a little less familiar. But it also just feels less important. Like, I need to really understand forms just to make a functioning web app. Flash is an important, convenient tool, but it's not a central part of the functionality, and it's also separate, something I can focus my attention on and add to my skill set separately. 

I'm not sure I understand what's generating the errors associated with an unsucessful signup.