Build a Todo List with Rails 4

I ended going through the Build a Simple Ruby on Rails Application course sometime after finishing the track and felt that part of the reason for the glossing over of things the Todo list application might be because it wasn't originally supposed to be stand alone, but to be seen after the simple application.

My biggest trouble point would probably be that scaffolding was the first way that was discussed on creating everything instead of using the model, controller, and other generators. I've also read on numerous stackoverflow posts that scaffolding isn't the recommended way to approach things(not sure if its just for the reason that it oversimplifies things to start or if there's another reason for that).

I mostly understood things going through, but when trying to start from scratch on a project of my own and not using scaffolding, I did find myself wondering a bit about how to approach it. The learning from this project so far has been great, but also a lot slower than I am typically used to.

You could try the ruby track first if you haven't already

agree Jason. Seems like the Ruby section is either outdated for a few of the items and the ones that are there are intermediate. I thought I was in the Ruby track.. guess I was in the Rails track.. will do the Ruby one first.

I just went into the Rails Development track and saw I had most of the non-Ruby stuff done, so I thought I'd take a crack at it. I'm pretty good with how programming languages work, so I first did the Ruby Basics section, and had no problems. I also had no problems understanding how to install a Ruby on Rails Development Environment.

Like you say, though, Jason, once he started building the actual app, Jason Seifer really does fly through things without giving much explanation of why he's doing different things. I looked at the Ruby track, but it's mostly just explaining how to do different things in Ruby (like working with objects and whatnot) that I am confident I would have no problems with.

I think the problem is that there really is no explanation beforehand as to why you would develop with Rails, or an overview of the development process. As an example, like Jason mentioned, he immediately dives into "this is how to create an application test," without really explaining that you can create tests or why you would create them in the first place. Another example is when he is creating the scaffold and just types, "title:string description:text" and then magically a few seconds later, he has a complete working HTML form with no explanation of how it got there.

I haven't had any issues understanding Treehouse content so far, but with this one, it really does feel like a section is missing and that the pace is too fast and assumes you already have knowledge about Rails.