Tech Talent South Week 2 Update

Tech Talent South has greatly sharpened my understanding of many programming basics I thought I had already mastered. It has only been two weeks with the program and  I cannot not over emphasize how great it is to have an instructor to bounce questions off of. TTS runs four days a week, four hours each class and two extra office hours each day. So far we have covered the basics of Ruby (arrays, methods, hashes, and Classes), which I had studied when I first began to learn in August by reading Chris Pine's book, "Learn to Program". It was a good refresher on the Ruby language since I had not done anything with Ruby since I read Pines book and I also enjoyed being around other students during the learning process. I have also found it valuable to see how others work out the problems as they go; it ultimately helps me think about problems in different ways, something I could not duplicate working on my own most of the time.

Last week (week 2) we got into Rails which I was really excited about since this was essentially uncharted territory for me. I remember just starting out I wanted to try rails after finishing some ruby stuff but gave up after an installation fail. lol. Thinking back to that point I remember being overwhelmed with all of the information out there and not knowing where the hell to go. Being in this program really helps with that. Now I have a set curriculum with an instructor leading the way to help out when I get hung up on something.

This weekend I started going through the Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl, which is a great supplement to what we are doing in class. I have gotten through the middle of Ch 3, which is basically what we have accomplished in class up to this point. I have to say that going over this book after the work we do in class really helps me understand the concept of rails and how the MVC framework functions. In my own words, when you type something in the browser that then goes to the rails router and requests that page from the controller with the same name. That then, using instance variables, goes to the model which retrieves the information from the database, returns that to the controller which then goes to the view page, renders the html back to the controller and to the browser...and boom, web page.

We created some small rails apps so far including a mock university which uses a database to store classes, students, grades, and depatments. I have gotten a lot more familiar with the command line as a result of using rails as well as a general knowledge of git and heroku. I'm really excited to see what I can get my hands on this week as I continue to further my learning in and out of the classroom.

-John