Code Academy: Week Three

I felt more in control during week three than at any other point during the program. Some of the basic steps that we had learned during the first two weeks finally felt like they sunk in a little more, and I noticed that by the end of last week I was able to use those steps without much thought. And those were steps I knew nothing about just three weeks ago, so to put them into practice and every once in a while reflect on how far I've come felt pretty good. Unfortunately, as I feel a little more comfortable with the basics, the more advanced stuff continues to approach and present itself, leaving me feel about as overwhelmed as I did when I started.

A big portion of the difficulty in learning Ruby on Rails (or any type of web development) is that you aren't just learning one thing. Within the first three weeks, I've spent more than a few hours trying to learn the basics of Rails, Ruby, HTML, CSS, TextMate Editor, GitHub, Heroku, and the command line, and each of these aspects alone is the subject of hundreds of tutorials and guides. Rails actually makes it all a bit easier because you can learn all of these things within the context of the framework rather than tackling each of them. For example, you don't really need to know a lot of Ruby when you're first learning Rails and the Ruby that you do indeed need to know, you'll likely pick up while learning Rails. But for me, a process orientated learner, having all of these new subjects and topics thrown at me all at once has been overwhelming. I don't want to learn a new topic when I haven't even conquered the topic that the new one is built upon.

Code Academy has done a good job of feeding us digestable portions of content that limit our exposure to "too much, too soon," and I've found that the Michael Hartl Ruby on Rails tutorial has been equally helpful in providing a very practical and easy to follow guide to learning not just Rails but a lot of the other aspects I mentioned above. So far, the combination of the CA coursework and the tutorial have been a great way to rather quickly learn the basics in a structured and logical manner. I've also spent a lot of time going through the Learning to Program book to learn the basics of Ruby which has helped me better understand Rails. This approach has worked for me up to this point, and I'm starting to feel just about in a position to start building my own projects. They won't be pretty but they'll exist, and that's a lot more than I could have said three weeks ago.