15min of mentorship asked

Dear RoR’ers,

I would like to call in a bit of help from the more experienced members.
The situation and question is very simple (as it always is ;)).
For the next 20 days I have nothing on my hands except learning RoR, how
can I boost my skills in this short amount of time?

  • which books should I read (can also be ones that are not directly
    related to RoR)
  • Should I find a mentor? Where to look?
  • Would it be wise to start by building a real-world project right-away?
    What kind?
  • The most important question: what did I forget to ask?

In order for you to be able to give a decent answer I’ll give you some
more extra information on me, myself and I.

Where do I start?

  • My programming background is in PHP (but let’s not talk about that too
    much before I make you all sick :p)
  • suffice to know that I think I know the fundamental building blocks of
    an application (MVC, OOP, REST, …)
  • I already read & marked the first half of Agile web development with
    Rails (4th edition -> so Rails 3)

Where do I want arrive?

  • In the future I would like to build applications on which I:
    ** can be proud of
    ** Rely on enough to sell to SME’s

Why do I want to invest my time?

  • I’m already totally convinced of the framework idea.
  • There are many frameworks, why why RoR?
    ** I just love the idea of convention over configuration
    ** I have the impression that people who invested there time in RoR have
    a passion for their work, they are opinionized and professional.
    ** Who doesn’t want to join that ‘crew’?

Kind regards,
Pj

On 11 September 2012 11:04, Pj M. [email protected] wrote:

What kind?

  • The most important question: what did I forget to ask?

You have not said what OS you are using. If at all possible use Linux
(Ubuntu for example) or Mac. Rails on Windows is tricky.
Install RVM to manage ruby and gems.
Work right through a tutorial such as railstutorial.org, which is free
to use online.

Colin

Hi there,

I’m operating on a windows machine.
However the kind of advice I’m looking for is not so technical in nature
that I need advice how to get RoR running on my machine.

With the help of AWDWR I already built the depot app on my machine. Now
I’m looking for tips to get the most out of the language in 20 days.

Regards,
Pj

On 11 Sep 2012 13:59, “Pj M.” [email protected] wrote:

Hi there,

I’m operating on a windows machine.
However the kind of advice I’m looking for is not so technical in nature
that I need advice how to get RoR running on my machine.

With the help of AWDWR I already built the depot app on my machine. Now
I’m looking for tips to get the most out of the language in 20 days.

Spend the first two days installing and familiarising yourself with
Ubuntu
and RVM … it’ll repay itself many times over in future savings.