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.

The book leads you through building a photo/slideshow application. It does a nice job of giving the reader a taste of a lot of the powerful features of RoR. For me personally, my eyes lit up at the ease of implementing some AJAX features. It had me dragging and dropping in no time.

I have always been an individual that learns 20 times faster by seeing something done rather than reading through the Rails API. This book is very good about showing small pieces of the puzzle and then starts connecting them as the book proceeds.

After finishing “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running,” I have realized it is time to go back to the drawing board for the application I initially built. The initial app was completely patchwork and was a rough assimilation of all the tutorials I had found online as well as the help I got from the Ruby on Rails IRC channel. Which, by the way, is probably one of the most useful places to get help. I hadn’t built in any kind of testing features and had only used one of the three Rails environments provided with the initial setup. Without having those environments, I would be “upgrading” my application with live data, which common sense tells me is a bad idea.

With the new tools provided by this book I am going to try building this application again.

I feel pretty good about my progress so far, coming from a non-programming background, yet I know there is a long way to go before I can say I know Ruby on Rails. The only big question left is how to build in a login system.

Another goal of mine is to eventually write something intelligent about Rails.

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