4 ms·

Does this endorsement also apply to people who don't already know Ruby?

vqc 12y ago
I think it does. I didn't know any Ruby before I started the tutorial, and I have long since forgotten the Ruby that I learned (because I don't use it daily). But I think a lot of the value depends on what you are looking for and how familiar you are with web development generally. The magic of the tutorial (to me) is that it tries to package together the entire development cycle for you. It gives you the foundation for building a real usable, launchable application. Concepts like authentication and authorization are extremely important and usually not covered very well. You learn to set up heroku and push updates. You learn testing, version control etc. For someone who has finished codeacademy, javascriptissexy, etc., I think a common problem is, "ok great ,I understand for loops, and while loops, wtf do I do now? I have this CRUD problem I want to solve that no one else is solving. How do I put it together? I want a login page. I need to input information. How do I connect all this?" Once you finish this tutorial, you know what the process looks like for Rails. Then you can genericize your knowledge and explore Sails, Meteor, Django, Flask, Ember, MEAN, Play, etc with a foundation and an ability to start asking questions.
ndesaulniers 12y ago
Absolutely. Ruby is one of the easiest programming languages to get up and running with. It also has some of the coolest metaprogramming techniques I have ever seen.
Bahamut 12y ago
Yup, even relatively new to programming as well (at least, it was immense use for me). You learn a lot of other things as well, including some tooling of the modern developer (working with Git, working with a PaaS like Heroku), and a bit about databases, unit testing, HTML markup, and CSS. Not everything will necessarily click for you as you read it, but it is a great entry point.

vqc 12y ago

I think it does. I didn't know any Ruby before I started the tutorial, and I have long since forgotten the Ruby that I learned (because I don't use it daily). But I think a lot of the value depends on what you are looking for and how familiar you are with web development generally. The magic of the tutorial (to me) is that it tries to package together the entire development cycle for you. It gives you the foundation for building a real usable, launchable application. Concepts like authentication and authorization are extremely important and usually not covered very well. You learn to set up heroku and push updates. You learn testing, version control etc. For someone who has finished codeacademy, javascriptissexy, etc., I think a common problem is, "ok great ,I understand for loops, and while loops, wtf do I do now? I have this CRUD problem I want to solve that no one else is solving. How do I put it together? I want a login page. I need to input information. How do I connect all this?" Once you finish this tutorial, you know what the process looks like for Rails. Then you can genericize your knowledge and explore Sails, Meteor, Django, Flask, Ember, MEAN, Play, etc with a foundation and an ability to start asking questions.

ndesaulniers 12y ago

Absolutely. Ruby is one of the easiest programming languages to get up and running with. It also has some of the coolest metaprogramming techniques I have ever seen.

Bahamut 12y ago

Yup, even relatively new to programming as well (at least, it was immense use for me). You learn a lot of other things as well, including some tooling of the modern developer (working with Git, working with a PaaS like Heroku), and a bit about databases, unit testing, HTML markup, and CSS. Not everything will necessarily click for you as you read it, but it is a great entry point.