In the last week I have signed up to attend the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. The dream would be to hit up all three aspects of the festival, Film, Music, and Interactive, oh well. The interactive part of the conference has me super stoked. There will be three of us attending from our lil agency here in Portland. We are staying at the Radison a few blocks from where the conference is located. Did I mention I am super stoked?

The other conference I signed up for is the RailsConf 2007. Now I would be the first person to admit that I am a Rails n00b, even a programming n00b. But the quickness in which stuff seems to get off the ground and the design-minded development community have me bound and determined to add it to my webdesign batbelt. RailsConf is here in Portland which happens to be very convenient for me. I think I can hit the conference center with a stone from where I sit typing this.

Now if only all conferences were in Portland, then I could attend them all. Just kidding, I want to visit the Austins of the world. My professional development budget has now been capped out. Wahoo.

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There are many ways to learn Rails and here are a few that seem to work from me:

1. del.icio.us - Subscribe to the Ruby on Rails tag. This feed constantly brings the latest and greatest from the Rails world into your RSS reader. While I read somewhere recently that you will never learn the language by just reading the code (which I agree with), it helps to see what is going on within the community.

2. Tutorials - I try to do a couple of tutorials a week. Often times a list of tutorials will come through my del.icio.us RSS feed and I try to do the tutorials listed. Mainly tutorials are useful if you are trying to do similar things within your app. Going through tutorials helps one understand how the source code works together, but must be applied right away to whatever you are doing. Otherwise it’s just like reading the code and not coding.

3. Books - There are a few great books out there, my favorite being the O’Reilly book, “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running.” Books are nice because they usually take you through the process of learning a whole application, versus just knowing a few snapshots of it.

That’s about it. How do you get your daily dose of Rails?

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I have never tried to learn a programming language in the same fashion I am trying to learn Ruby on Rails. It takes a lot of dedication and persistance. At times I am finding it a bit discouraging, as there is a whole lot to learn. I have no basis for comparison, so when tutorials describe a similarity to another language, it brings me no extra help.

That being said, I am truly enjoying building stuff in Ruby on Rails. I picked up the O’Reilly book, “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running,” by the same guy who did the first few tutorials I followed, Curt Hibbs.
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For the last few years, the idea of learning programming has interested me. The first language I tried to pick up was PHP. I now have snippets of code here and there I can paste and reuse, but I don’t know the language. PHP has a lot of syntax, and trying to pick it up as a “side thing” just wasn’t working for me. Not to mention the level of discipline one has to have to learn a language.

Enter Ruby on Rails. About a month ago, I decided to digg into the language that is so hot right now. Why not? I’m a HUGE follower. Actually I saw Michael Buffington give a presentation at WebVisions 2006 here in Portland.

This will be the first of many posts describing my struggle to learn RoR.
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After watching Michael Buffington’s presentation of Ruby On Rails, I decided it was time to start learning. I had quite a few obstacles in getting everything up and running. There are three key components - Following a tutorial, getting YourSQL, and following a tutorial.

I was able to create a simple cookbook app in very short order. If I ignore all of the technical hang-ups I had due to my lack of attention to detail, then it would have been 5X as fast. Here is a brief overview of my system:

2.0 Ghz iMac Intel Core-Duo
2 gigs of Ram
OSX 10.4.7
Previous local webserver/apache/mysql experience: Many failed attempts
Recovering PC addict - 5 months
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