Comment by duopixel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duopixel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The actual story is linked in the nav (for those wondering).

This matches my experience with programming too. It's just beautiful how pieces fall into place when you first start programming.

I remember first taking a look into Rails when it was first released, as I'm a designer and I was into 37signals work back when they were a design shop. My reaction was "what the fuck is this"?

Some months later I had to collaborate front-end code with git, and ssh into a couple of servers. I started to feel comfortable at the console, so I took a look at Rails again, but it was still too difficult.

Wanting do add some interactivity to my front-end code, so I started using jQuery. Of course it was the naive selector spagetti code, but it got me started with programming. Took a look at Rails again, too hard.

I then dabble into really simple MySQL databases driven by PHP. What a nightmare, wasn't this supposed to be solved by ActiveRecord? I take a look at Rails again, and it starts making sense.

Then the pre-parse craze came out, so I learned CoffeeScript and Sass. CoffeeScript happens to greatly simplify js OOP code, and has some bits of Ruby's syntactic sugar, so this time I another look at Rails and suddenly it all starts making sense.

All those bits and pieces you collect from real project experience come together and suddenly the you have crossed the gap to create a full web application.

Personally, this is one of the biggest hurdle in making myself to learn/understand coding – how everything fits together.

HTML/CSS is easy enough, but I still don't understand how Ruby/Rails fit with HTML/CSS in web development/application. I read Rails is a framework coded in Ruby, and they're used for web development/apps – so I look at Ruby and that's where I get lost. Starting from the bottom (learning about arrays and what not, it's hard to stay focused when you don't know what exactly is the benefit and outcome of all this learning and how it fits in web development).

I came across a path, or tree skill, that recommends how one should approach web development:

HTML > CSS > JS/PHP > JQuery, then once you get that down, it's Ruby > Rails.

Hopefully when I look at Ruby/Rails, I won't feel so lost again.

>you don't know what exactly is the benefit and outcome of all this learning and how it fits in web development

This is not your fault; most tutorials and intros are horrifically coded and introduced.

You'll often find obscenely arbitrary examples that have literally no place in actual coding. Take for example Backbone.js' introductions. It's an incredibly powerful tool for front end MVC work, but it took me a long time to "get it", because there are literally no examples on their site that pertain to any realistic or practical usage of the framework.

To wit: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Model

They themselves admit that this is a useless example, but choose to use it anyway. It confuses the Model and View purposes, and if it appeared in any actual implementation of Backbone, would break just about every convention in existence. Why even use it?

I know they want to avoid telling people how to use it, because it's so open-ended, but it doesn't hurt to establish some common practices or mechanisms. It took me a long time to figure out a good way to link models and views agnostically, simply because they don't address that whatsoever in the docs.

I was on the same path, and did some Ruby by way of Sinatra for a class I was taking, and now I'm in a course learning Node.js + Express and I'm totally happy.

That looks like a good path, I'd add CoffeeScript after jQuery as it makes a great bridge between JS and Ruby.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com