MattyMc

Do it! I would love to know the answer to this as well. I bet there's a great story here.

Also, coolest 404 page ever!

Dang, what is ring-voting? Is it using multiple accounts to up-vote a post?

How do you generate revenue from this free service?

Forgive me for asking, but what is your revenue model? (If you wouldn't mind sharing). Love the service.

Alternatively, if this hacker had a method different than what he/she described to obtain the necessary information, it would make sense that he/she would describe a false sequence of events in order to throw the account holder off the trail.

This question should establish a separation between the content that mathematics teaches, and the cognitive abilities that develop as a result of learning mathematics.

Could an 11 year old dive into the CRUD with an 11 year old's mathematical knowledge? Absolutely. Will he/she have the ability to rough it through debugging challenging problems that may emerge without the years grit developed as a result of solving difficult calculus and linear algebra problems? Possibly. Perhaps not.

Either way, you sound like an awesome dad :) I say let him have at it!

If you have experience with SQL you might be far better off than I was. Try starting with the book in this thread; it seems like an excellent starter book and covers many concepts that frankly, myself and others had to piece together from Stack Overflow questions. The best advice I can give you is to start with a project; what do you want to make? If you're set on Rails, jump into Ruby using the nice online book Learn Ruby the Hard Way. Consider checking out Rails for Zombies for a nice, fun intro into Rails and then dive into the book listed in this thread. Best of luck! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

It's been almost three years since I began spending nearly every available evening and weekend learning code and web dev. It's been a great adventure. However, contrary to the advice I was given I believe Ruby on Rails is not an effective place to start learning web dev, it certainly wasn't for me.

When I started, I had limited knowledge of HTML and almost no experience with CSS, Javascript, SQL or HTTP. I felt bombarded going through Michael Hartl's book (ruby.railstutorial.org), for example, trying to pick up all the concepts mentioned above plus the ideas of Unit Testing, ActiveRecord, the MVC paradigm, Rake, GIT, Migrations, layouts, partials and UNIX, to name a few. Nothing was sticking.

After now learning some programming fundamentals through an awesome Coursera course, learning C++ and Python to make small game mechanic, digging into PHP and launching a few fun websites, building a few projects with raw HTML and CSS while having lots of fun with jQuery and Javascript I feel I am ready for and can appreciate Rails. I'm now approximately 4-6 months from launching my first commercial product and this book will be perfect for my current purposes. I'm 25 pages in and can say that I love it's narrow focus (not including unit tests, for example) and also it's thorough explanation of all core concepts. I've backed the Kickstarter and can't to keep learning! Sorry for the long post HN! Long time lurker, big fan.