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Congrats on adding another huge helping of value to the Rails community Michael. Once I have some free time and finish getting through "Agile Rails Development

Congrats on adding another huge helping of value to the Rails community Michael. Once I have some free time and finish getting through "Agile Rails Development 4th Edition" I'll likely be taking another stab at your Rails tutorial. I started learning Rails with the previous version, but quickly got overwhelmed with things and needed to take a step back. I had an overwhelming sense that I was just following the examples without really understanding why I was doing something, why syntax was a certain way, etc. (particularly with unit tests). Now that I've improved my overall knowledge a bit, I'm not as intimidated by these concepts so should be able to make it further in your tutorial while internalizing more than before. Interesting choice to move to a cloud-based IDE and I can see where it makes a lot of sense. That said, having recently started exploring the world of Vagrant and Chef (and all the frustrations therein), it would be interesting to go down that path as well to walk people through setting up their development environment. Of course I can see just as many reasons (if not more) for why that was not included in the scope of the tutorial.

mhartl 12y ago
Thanks! I actually made a VM using Vagrant when scoping out the 3rd edition, but getting everything to work cross-platform was almost as much trouble as just installing things natively. That's why I ended up going with the cloud IDE. By the way, I recommend reading the Rails Tutorial before Agile Web Development with Rails, which makes a good follow-on (as indicated at https://www.railstutorial.org/book/following_users#sec-guide_to_further_resources https://www.railstutorial.org/book/following_users#sec-guide...). But of course go with whatever works best for you.
- shostack 12y ago
  I hear you on getting everything to work...I still can't get Chef to install the proper version of Ruby with RVM or install the gems I want. Finally I gave up on the version issue and just did it myself, and then rely on gemfiles for the gems. Can you elaborate on why specifically you recommend your tutorial first? Are there certain foundational topics you feel are left out of Agile Web Development with Rails that are important for a novice to understand?
  - mhartl 12y ago
    I feel like Agile assumes you basically know web development. It has lots of great material, but it's not structured to build up from zero, so I think the Rails Tutorial is probably a better place to start for most people.

mhartl 12y ago

Thanks! I actually made a VM using Vagrant when scoping out the 3rd edition, but getting everything to work cross-platform was almost as much trouble as just installing things natively. That's why I ended up going with the cloud IDE. By the way, I recommend reading the Rails Tutorial before Agile Web Development with Rails, which makes a good follow-on (as indicated at https://www.railstutorial.org/book/following_users#sec-guide_to_further_resources https://www.railstutorial.org/book/following_users#sec-guide...). But of course go with whatever works best for you.

shostack 12y ago
I hear you on getting everything to work...I still can't get Chef to install the proper version of Ruby with RVM or install the gems I want. Finally I gave up on the version issue and just did it myself, and then rely on gemfiles for the gems. Can you elaborate on why specifically you recommend your tutorial first? Are there certain foundational topics you feel are left out of Agile Web Development with Rails that are important for a novice to understand?
- mhartl 12y ago
  I feel like Agile assumes you basically know web development. It has lots of great material, but it's not structured to build up from zero, so I think the Rails Tutorial is probably a better place to start for most people.