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Draft chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 3rd Edition

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Re: Draft chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 3rd Edition

#21

Post by jarrettch »

pzaich wrote: post #6

Very encouraging to see tests used more sparingly. I was a novice developer when I first tried this tutorial and found myself lost in the weeds when I tried to follow along with rspec. Understanding the difference between rspec and cucumber probably isn't critical at that point. The tutorial made a lot more sense to me after someone recommended ignoring the tests the first time through.

My first time going through(and then second time a few weeks later), I totally ignored the tests and felt like I was better for it as well.

Re: Draft chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 3rd Edition

#22

Post by gyardley »

These sound like really awesome improvements - that installation and configuration cliff and the heavy use of RSpec were the two things that kept me from recommending the 2nd Edition to beginners.

If you've got time, it'd be nice to see the installation and configuration chapter make it in as an appendix, since new programmers are going to want to set up their development environment at some point - it's just better to have it at the end of the book, when they've hopefully already gotten hooked.

Re: Draft chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 3rd Edition

#23

Post by mhartl »

gyardley wrote: post #22

These sound like really awesome improvements - that installation and configuration cliff and the heavy use of RSpec were the two things that kept me from recommending the 2nd Edition to beginners. If you've got time, it'd be nice to see the installation and configuration chapter make it in as an appendix, since new programmers are going to want to set up their development environment at some point - it's just better…

Thanks for the suggestion and for the kind words. Instructions for setting up a local development environment are already effectively an appendix, because the Ruby on Rails Tutorial just defers to the excellent [InstallRails](http://installrails.com/) service provided by One Month Rails.

Re: Draft chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 3rd Edition

#24

Post by ekar45 »

DanielKehoe wrote: post #16

Wow! I am mentioned in Chapter 1. > If you still find this tutorial too difficult, you might try starting with "Learn Ruby on Rails" by Daniel Kehoe... Thank you, Michael. It's generous to mention my book. I've said that we need a better introduction for beginners and I'm overjoyed to see the improvements in the 3rd Edition. In the last two years, so many more people want to learn Rails, often without any background…

we use both books at our Coder in 90 online bootcamp at coderin90.com

Re: Draft chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 3rd Edition

#26

Post by mhartl »

amrtnz wrote: post #25

do you recommend using an online IDE only for beginners or is it something you would utilize for your own projects?

So far I've only used them for the tutorial, but I definitely expect to start using cloud IDEs for real projects as well. They've really come of age in the last year or two. I suggest giving the recommended cloud IDE a try to see if it might meet your needs as well.

Re: Draft chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 3rd Edition

#27

Post by amrtnz »

mhartl wrote: post #26
amrtnz wrote: post #25

do you recommend using an online IDE only for beginners or is it something you would utilize for your own projects?

So far I've only used them for the tutorial, but I definitely expect to start using cloud IDEs for real projects as well. They've really come of age in the last year or two. I suggest giving the recommended cloud IDE a try to see if it might meet your needs as well.

Thanks so much for replying! I am president of the Coding Club in my high school, and a lot of the rails teaching that I'm doing is based off of what I learned in your book. The school doesn't allow installing software on the computers, so using a Cloud IDE will be perfect for us. Thank you so much for writing such a great tutorial!

Re: Draft chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 3rd Edition

#28

Post by hayksaakian »

Hi Michael

Thank you for creating this resource, I used your book to learn ruby on rails.

I think all of the changes you made make sense to a person new to rails and they solve problems/walls I hit while progressing through the book:

- setup/configuring rails. In my case I was using non standard hardware, a web IDE eliminates the issue

- default stack: while going through the book, I was also referring to the official rails documentation, which uses defaults like mini-test and not rspec. Juggling two testing frameworks as someone new to web development was overwhelming.

- test lite: same as above

- version specific features: removing another point of failure is good

- highlighting lines: not sure, but it's good to see innovation

Re: Draft chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 3rd Edition

#30

Post by Bahamut »

I'd like to thank Michael for putting so much work into this - it has helped me obtain a baseline of knowledge to get into web development as my career about 2 years back (even though I have been mostly doing JavaScript professionally), and I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone interested in trying to learn about web development.
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