Ruby on Rails Tutorial: sample application

This is the sample application for Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example by Michael Hartl.

09/10/10 I am going to use this readme as my journal and since it is hosted publicly, anyone reading who may be similar to me, maybe I can help. Writing also help me remember, thus learn....I hope. :)

A little preface about myself. I am not a programmer although I do know a little scripting in databases and play with php files here and there to just accomplish some neat features I want to have on my websites. I have been using computers since DOS and pretty much every OS to Windows 7 and Mac OSX 10 sine then. I would consider myself an advanced user from a technical standpoint as I have always had an electronics interest and that naturally propelled me to computers and of course figuring out what made them tick.

This has been trial and error so far. I started with this tutorial 3 days ago and have put in maybe 2-3 hours per day. Today has been what I consider the most progress as much of the previous time was spent just getting the system configured. I had a few issues with configuring my iMac i7 with OSX 10.6.4. Mac has their own developers kit that anyone with a mac can download that includes ruby on rails. Unfortunately the current distribution is 1.8.7 and 2.2.3 (if I remember that 2.2.3 correctly). For this tutorial, Michael suggests 1.9.2 and 3.0.0. To finally get to those versions that I needed I had to use RVM. After tinkering here and there, re-reading and so fourth, I finally got up and running. One of the key things I have learned so far is that you should be very selective about using "sudo" when installing.

I understand that sudo gives you "root" or "superuser" access but I am logged in as a user and when installing things I need access from the user level. This is not to say that sudo is wrong but if you do not understand the power of sudo and how badly it can F'up a system, don't do it! until you learn. I am fortunate that I did not have any system issues but I do attribute that to a in and out of linux background.

Two of the things this tutorial has you do is set up git for version control and heroku for testing. They are pretty straight forward to get running but when running some commands my results were odd with permissions denied and so fourth. I would re-trace my steps, try it again and it would work. I think the reason behind that is that I was just not patient enough for those 2 sites to be updated.....fingers crossed that this does not happen again.

This tutorial is the main tutorial starting on Chapter 3 and continues til the end. I obviously went through the earlier tutorials that taught me how to get everything configured and showed me structure and samples of ruby on rails. So far, very database like to me. I have a very good understanding of relational databases and if learning continues this way I have to say that I am very excited. I may be able to finally create some websites with features I want and not having to scour the internet for a plug-in to make work maybe 85% of what I actually wanted. With that being said, why do I have the feeling that I will be scouring for gems ;).

One thing I want to point out at this time is I still am confused about deployment and I know this tutorial will not be teaching me that as they use heroku. Heroku is VERY easy and while I appreciate easy, I need to know! Specifically, my webhost is running 1.8.7 so what kind of conflicts will I run into. In their tutorial, they have you setting up databases via mysql and they also mention limitations do to having to proxy.....