Code Academy: Week Two

I haven't really done any useful computer programming or website development. I took some programming courses in college and have messed around with HTML, but I've never actually coded an application or anything (until last week!). So, you can take my opinion with a grain of salt, that of a beginner who doesn't really know any better, but after spending two weeks learning the beginnings of Ruby on Rails, I must insist that it is the coolest thing around if you're at all interested in web application coding. And maybe even just the coolest thing around.

Why? My sexy answer is that as a complete beginner to the framework and the Ruby language, I had a working web application up and running by the end of last week (sexy!). It was a simple bank account site that showed the bank's accounts and each account's balance and allowed you to add, edit, and delete accounts. Each of those functions (add, edit, delete) could be done by a user on the site and his/her actions on the site were completely mapped to a database that kept track of all of the accounts and the accounts' information. Sure, the site looked a little like 1996, but I was able to add all that site functionality with just a few steps. 

Of course, we learned about the unsexy answer too. Admittedly, I'm still trying to grasp all of this, but as I understand it now, Rails is cool because of its slick use of restful routing and its scaffold generator.  Unsexy - 

• Restful routing - Rails has a way in which it can handle requests and map them to seven different actions and this is all done with one simple line of code
• Scaffold generate - This generates a database resource based on convention (what you'd initially want 80% of the time)

Actually seeing these two portions of Rails in action is sweet (and much more convincing than my above explanation) and since learning these little bits of Rails, I've started to think of every webpage I visit in a new way, one in which I try to figure out how someone may have built the initial site, and I've started to think of my own ideas within the context of "how would I go about building that using Rails." It's inspiring and yet completely overwhelming. In week two, I grasped the power that Rails can give me but my skills at using that power are still so frustratingly weak that I'm left just slowly chipping away at the overwhelming amount of material to learn so that one day I may enjoy the fruits of that power. I'm not there yet but at least I now know how I might get there - Ruby on Rails.