Resources for the TIY-Durham Rails course.
We don’t believe you can really learn to program by watching a few videos and answering some questions (and if you believed that, you probably wouldn’t be coming to The Iron Yard). However, skill acquisition takes a long time, and this work will help introduce you to some of the ideas and skills that will form the foundation of your in-person learning experience.
Complete this through the “Conclusion” survey by August 17th, one week before class begins. This timing is both so that I can review and so that you can rest before class starts. If you have ANY questions at all, please reach out to me at mason.matthews@theironyard.com.
(Oh, but first, don’t forget to set up your Mac!)
The following are the learning objectives for the prework. Although only a subset are technically “programming” skills, they are crucially important to success both during the class and on the job.
The prework should assure us that you can:
Not surprisingly, you will continue to work towards these objectives throughout the course.
After reading these articles, please fill out the following survey:
Before we dive into Ruby proper, let’s get a primer on some fundamental programming concepts. We’re going to read the first few chapters in a book on JavaScript (sadly, no similarly awesome introduction exists in a book on Ruby). The last chapter you’ll be reading has a bit of JavaScript syntax, so I apologize for the differences that you’ll be seeing soon.
Okay, great. Now that some fundamentals are out of the way, let’s look at Ruby syntax a bit.
You guessed it. There’s WAY more to Ruby than this, and if you’ve done other tutorials, that’s great. We just want to make sure that you have some exposure in advance.
It’s time now to go beyond the work of programming and talk about the tools that make it possible for us to program.
The command line is an interface to the internals of your computer, as opposed to the graphical user interface (GUI) that we commonly use. We will be using the command line extensively in our class, but the point of this prework is not to be an expert, just to start to get comfortable.
Especially if you’ve never used the command line before, you may want to go through these more than once. Make sure not just to read/watch, but really dive in and use the commands that you learn about.
In order to complete some of these tasks, you will need to register for an account with Treehouse. Treehouse is free for 14 days (which should be more than enough to finish the required courses), and is $25/month after the trial.
Okay. Now you know how to access and work with files, folders, etc, We have to take it a bit further. In our business, we don’t just need to access the current version of our code. We may have made mistakes along the way, made messes for ourselves, and want to access older versions of our code for this reason (and for making working in teams easier), we use version control systems.
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. It is a command line tool that we will be using for every project we do in class. Again, the objective is not to become an expert before the class, but just to start to get comfortable.
Almost done. Although we’re not going to talk about them in the first few weeks of class, HTML and CSS are the foundation of all the content of a webpage or web app. This will help get you primed so that we can keep our momentum when we shift from pure Ruby to Ruby on Rails.
Once you have finished the prework given above, complete the following survey:
Whew, you did it. Now, your only remaining assignment is to get some sleep before class starts. You’re going to need it!
If you find yourself with way more time and want to dig deeper, check out the optional exercises.