How I learned Rails

I began re-making [Three Word Poems][poems] by first following tutorials from Code School and applying those learnings to a new design for the site. Feeling I’d graduated from this method, I began fleshing out the project picking up bits from various sites as needed. At some point I got stuck, and searched for a more in-depth Rails application building tutorial. Michael Hartl’s The Rails Tutorial seemed just the thing. I took the same approach as with Code School: completing the examples and then applying them to my project. This lead to some re-working, so the whole process has been very slow. I admit I skipped applying the early teachings to the existing project and this is why I’m in hot water now.

Chapter 1 of the book leads the student from zero code to deploying a “Hello, World” app on Heroku, creating & editing files and committing to a fresh git repository along the way. I skipped the remote deployment with the Three Word Poems remake because I worried the image uploading code I’d already made would cause problems. I also wasn’t sure how to get a pre-populated database of seed and dummy data up into the cloud. The feeling of being stuck was more about applicaiton architecture and how best to strcture routing and controllers than it was about deployment issues, so I didn’t want to deal with those at the time.