Learning Rails

This week, I've dedicated a good chunk of time to stumbling my way through Rails. I expect to be confused for at least a few more days, but I'm thankful for the abundance of great tutorials and training materials out there for learning the basics of building Rails apps. I'm also glad that I know something about Ruby, Javascript, HTML, and CSS before jumping into Rails—it makes the learning process much easier.

I was surprised by how easy it was to set up a database and create a basic blog using Rails scaffolding. I was also surprised by how much information comes prepackaged in Rails -- jQuery, default stylesheets, etc. I spent some time just reading through the individual files and trying to figure out how all of the pieces work together. While it's nice that it only takes a couple of minutes to create a blog in Rails, I can't say that I fully understand the process, or have the ability to make meaningful modifications (yet).

I'm beginning to learn Rails by working on a Task Queue application concept that I thought of a couple of months ago. Right now, it's just an exercise, but if things go well then it could evolve into a useful application.

As a total beginner, so far this is my favorite Rails resource that I've found.