Ask HN: Learning 2 Hack - For the very first time. With a deadline.

Once you're comfortable deploying, start making really small changes. Don't bother with books or classes yet - they'll round-out your knowledge once you know the basics, but in my experience they're not much use for getting people started. Begin by just editing bits of text on the website. Then progress to really small pieces of functionality. Try to deploy some small positive change to the site at least once a day. Doing this will build your confidence and get you to the point where you can make gradually bigger and bigger changes.

Do you have any friends that are developers? People generally enjoy when someone takes a genuine interest in their field. Perhaps ask politely if any of them would mind occasional IMs as you work your way through things.

Here are some links specific for rails deployment:

http://www.capify.org http://www.modrails.com/

This is specific to hostingrails (a rails hosting company), but it's the simplest tutorial I've found...

http://www.hostingrails.com/wiki/1/How-to-deploy-a-Rails-app...

Some other technologies that you may need:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastcgi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongrel_%28web_server%29

You posted this earlier today and I wrote you a reply, then when I hit 'submit' the page was deleted!

Here is what I wrote:

(1) Well, you certainly have your problems cut out for you.

You won't be lacking in motivation, that's for sure :)

Where to start...

Programming is a method, a way of thinking, it has nothing to do with the actual language that you use to do it in, that's just a means to an end (though judging by the various language wars they are probably more like religious factions). Changing your site is great, but you'll have to set up a development and a production environment, and make sure you run those on two separate databases to make sure that if you do something you end up regretting you can revert back without your users catching any grief.

(2) Pick whatever feels best and easiest to you. That choice seems to have been made for you, since you mention 'rails', but really that's a framework for a language called 'ruby'. So ruby comes first, then rails.

Probably your best bet is to start off with making a list of the terms that you keep coming across (rails, ruby, framework, webapp) and so on, then read the wikipedia page on each of those to give you a feel for the terminology.

A 'hash' is a programmers trick to turn any object (usually a string, but you can apply hashes to just about everything else) into a more or less unique number. That way it becomes easier to find things, hashing is used for many purposes but one of the main applications in programming languages is so allow you to find in a very short time an entry in a list without having to go through all the items in the list one by one.

Your best bet to understand this stuff given the requirements of your situation seems to be to get a book on entry-level ruby, read that until it falls apart making sure that you do and understand all the exercises, then to move on to the rails framework.

You can test things out but I think there are better ways of learning how to program a given framework than messing around with a live website.

(3) As for courses, there are lots of tutorials available online, I would advice you to find a programmer buddy, preferably one that already has experience in the field that you are interested in.

4) could be, depends on how much time you put in there and how much background you already have. It sounds like a tall order to me, but when sufficiently motivated I'm sure you'll amaze yourself in what you can do in three months of really hard work.

(5) I completely agree with you there, hence the tip for a programming buddy. I'd look for that IRL though, and only use online fora as a backup plan if you can't find a live human being.

best of luck with all of this, let us know how you fared!

j.

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