Finished Codecademy’s Ruby and Hartl’s Rails; questions about the next steps.

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So, my situation is as described in the title; and I'm currently having a go with "Agile Web Development with Rails 4".

Would an intermediate Ruby course have an extra benefit, or should I just pick it up the more I do rails? and if so, is there any good online course for that other than the one on RubyMonk? (I would like to understand Enumerables and Metaprogramming and how would they fit to non-complex Rails app)

I wanna learn Cucumber and Rspec; would the best strategy be to learn them as I go with my first app, or should I finish them up in theory first?!

I've wasted few weeks learning the wrong things on my way to pick up web development, and I would like to avoid that in the furture.

Thanks in advance.

2 thoughts on “Finished Codecademy’s Ruby and Hartl’s Rails; questions about the next steps.”

  1. I was in your shoes 2 weeks ago.

    Start building something.. I am taking an old site I coded in PHP and turning it into a rails site. I’ve learned so much more in the process and it’s nice to see that you can actually implement on your own. I’ve also had small successes each day and that is extremely motivating, I’m pretty addicted to adding new things to my code, adding features etc.

    It will seem impossible and very frustrating, but start of small.. write your own objectives/stories “ok, lets try to get my 3 static pages working… ok now lets make a posts model, create one post, and show that post on this page”

    rails for zombies was the only thing I did between hartl and starting my actual site. Refer back to hartls tutorial as well as you get stuck. build from there.

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  2. IMO, the best advice has been to make sure to try to implement your own projects. You can follow a lot of these tutorials and not get much out of them in terms of progression towards becoming a better developer. You have to engage the material. I try to pick tutorials where I can simultaneously apply the contents to my own project.

    Here’s something else that I think will be perfect for you & many others who are beginner to intermediate, check out this site:

    http://www.theodinproject.com/

    He’s got a seriously good battle plan for teaching you how to get proficient in Ruby, and eventually Rails (his rails curriculum is a work in progress). There’s also some good material for learning the concepts around web dev in general and front-end stuff with JS/Html/CSS. Also, its free. He tells you what to study and what you’re trying to get out of it, where to study it, and then gives you a project to flex those skills. Its really good. At the site, the projects : ‘Building Blocks’, ‘Advanced Building Blocks’, and especially the RSpec TDD project (forgot the name right now) will teach you plenty about enumerables, procs, modules, and other parts of the language that Rails takes advantage of. Can you tell I’m a big fan of that site and his efforts?

    Back to tutorials, you mentioned wanting to get into Cuce and RSpec… take a look at this free tutorial:

    http://railsapps.github.io/tutorial-rails-devise-rspec-cucumber.html

    Its not particularly in depth, but sometimes what you need is something to help you get your environment set up and clue you in on basic installation and use – and it does that.

    BTW, I think that Agile Web Dev book you’re having a go at is very good. Let us know how you feel about it.

    Last, I want to mention that what Bitsculpt did with that pig-latin project was exactly the kind of off-the-beaten-path kind of thinking that will get him/her hired! Imagine as a manager you have 10 candidates who have all finished some course/certification and are good at their stuff, and they all have the same tutorials in their github accounts to show, but here is this one person who integrated the same old stuff with the Twitter API and had fun along the way… who would you hire?

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