Results - Goal #2: Finish Learning Ruby on Rails

After I posted my goal on Sunday, @vrish88 told me about a great site called Rails for Zombies via twitter.

@MikeKusold nicely done sir. another great site for learning rails is http://t.co/89KMMwt

— Michael Lavrisha (@vrish88) February 28, 2011

Since the Lynda tutorial was a tad bit boring, and zombies are anything but boring, I decided to jump ship and complete all the Zombie tutorials instead.

On Monday, I completed the TryRuby.org tutorials. One of the interesting language choices that Ruby makes is that functions that don’t preserve your data end in a ‘!’. I like this a lot because it is a reminder that your data will be changed.

» ticket = [12,37,31]
=> [12, 37, 31]
» ticket.sort!
=> [12, 31, 37]

On Wednesday and Saturday, I completed all of the Rails for Zombies tutorials. The Rails for Zombies tutorial was good at explaining the language, but not as much as how to use the language. Because all the labs were done in an in-browser command line, I don’t actually have any work to show off. I still want to finish the Lynda tutorial because it walks you through an actual example.

Proof of Completion:

Do I understand the basics of Ruby and Rails? Yes. Can I fully develop an application with no reference material? Nope. But that will come with more experience. I am hoping that my plane flight to Utah for spring break(!!!) will give me time to learn more about Rails. I would like to use it to start my project website that I have been kicking around for the past 3/4 of a year.