Re: Totally lost in learning Ruby

On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 3:07 PM, Hilary Bailey <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Thanks a $llion for responding. Based on your response, where do I
> start? Is there a specific HTML guide?. What is CSS and which one or
> version should I use? And I guess the same applies to HTTP and
> JavaScript.

There's dozens of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript guides out there, but a
good starting point to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript is
w3schools.com.

Keep in mind, that those three are different, but related, technologies:
- HTML describes a site.
- CSS makes a site pretty.
- JavaScript manipulates a site.

As for versions of those: Take a look at w3schools.com. What you can
learn there will be supported by pretty much any recent browser (HTML
5 and CSS 3.0 aren't wildly deployed yet, and still in flux, though
the current generation of browsers is getting better at them: IE9,
Firefox 4, Chrome dev-channel).

You don't really need to learn HTTP (fortunately): If you decide on a
web-based solution, your webserver will take care of that. At most,
deal with error codes, of which you need to know 3:
404: Site not found.
500: Internal Server Error (a catch all, meaning that something in
your webserver went wrong).
200: The client request could be processed.

Those 3 are important to troubleshoot an application.

Also: Web servers, database servers, HTTP stuff etc. is more the
domain of a system administrator.

> To a novice like me,I am still trying to piece together an
> approach to learning how to program using and becoming a part of the
> Open Source community. The difficulty is that the kind individuals like
> yourself, who have answered my call for help have been tossing at me so
> many programs that end-up adding to the problem. Therefore I am going to
> take all the suggestions, place them in a learning sequential pattern
> and ask you again for your advice.

Well, you need two tools to develop Ruby applications: A texteditor,
and Ruby itself. Everything else is gravy. ;)

For web stuff, it helps to have a number of browsers installed, to see
if your markup code and JavaScript work as you think they should.
However, if you can find a web designer, they'll happily do that for
you, or grab a template for HTML and CSS off of a website, like
oswd.org or opensourcetemplates.org .


Of course, you'll want to look out for libraries that do what you want
to do, without you having to deal with the problem yourself, since
that means you can focus on your own application, rather than having
to deal with Yet Another Problem (we usually call that "yak shaving":
it's something you have to do, but isn't really getting you towards
solving the problem).

That can be database wrappers (means to interface with a database, and
doing so in a Ruby-ish syntax), or Markdown to format text without
having to deal with the gritty HTML, and so on.

Searching the web for "<my problem> Ruby library" usually helps, as
does taking a look at http://ruby-toolbox.com/

> At this moment the web option seems
> to be the closest answer to what I have been searching for. Getting
> there is the problem. I am willing to spends the grueling time learning
> it.

A good choice for that is, probably, Rails. You can easily install
Ruby and Rails with the RailsInstaller (railsinstaller.org), which
bundles all you need in one package, and you don't really need a web
server, or anything else to run a Rails app in development mode (which
is the default).

Rails has the other benefit that there are a lot of tutorials and
howtos to be found, and the Rails community one forum over can be
helpful, too.

Another very good resource is http://railscasts.com/, and I've heard
only good things about PeepCode.com's webcasts (which are pay for, but
everybody is raving about them).

While all of this seems like a lot, you can divide this with ease into
several steps:
- Learn Ruby and Rails (or another web framework, like Sinatra)
- Pick up the necessities of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Learn about application security (this is very, very important on
the internet!)
- Learn about deployment options for Rails (or the web framework you chose)
-- 
Phillip Gawlowski

Though the folk I have met,
(Ah, how soon!) they forget
When I've moved on to some other place,
There may be one or two,
When I've played and passed through,
Who'll remember my song or my face.