Big Nerd Ranch, Day 1
May 5th, 2008 | Published in Rails | 3 Comments
Today was my first day at the Ruby on Rails class at Big Nerd Ranch, where I’m joined by Aron. The setting (and weather) is beautiful, and while we got off to a slow start this morning, I’ve picked up a couple of useful things that I hadn’t known about Rails (which only leaves about a billion more). A brief roundup:
- .map { block } is plenty cool. .map(&:symbol) looks odd, but is more succinct.
- I now realize why you might render to a template. Cool.
- Array has a .to_csv method. Nice.
- Creating a new logger object and having it send to STDOUT helps make script/console more helpful.
- I now realize why flash is really useful.
- Controllers can figure out a url from an instance variable, apparently (Rails 2.0)
May 7th, 2008 at 2:06 pm (#)
The book “Ruby for Rails” is great if you want to understand the programming language features that go into rails like map. I’m partway through the book “The Rails Way” and it seems like a great exploration of Rails, explains a lot of these gems. I know I prefer more self-directed learning to instruction omre than you do, but they could be handy resources.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:50 pm (#)
oh man, u gotta tell me why is flash really useful? because i – for the life of me – can’t figure that out…
May 8th, 2008 at 8:47 pm (#)
Not *that* flash, Gabe…