can someone help me find the bug in my ODOT program?

yeah I noticed the period after deliveries looks wrong. Im guessing it should look like

(.... deliveries, :size)

Bingo =) I hate when this happens. The hint here for future reference is this:

syntax error, unexpected tSYMBEG, expecting '(' (SyntaxError) ...ctionMailer::Base.deliveries. :size) ... ^ 

Notice the error told you the line and even the snippet of code. SyntaxError means something is typed wrong versus an error in your logic. Most of the time this means you have a comma, period, parenthesis, something in the wrong place.

do you have any general comments about reading errors better? Right now I find them difficult to read cause the terminal just spews out a bunch of incoherent lines and no line breaks between errors. Surely theres some plugin I can download to rectify this issue. I run a mac OSX btw.

Not really. The error you want to look for happens in the first few lines usually. I always look for the file names of the file I'm working on. You'll see a bunch of other lines of error code (that's the internals from ruby/rails).

I look for a line number and a file and hunt it down. It's a process. I've been using ruby/rails for just about a year and certainly wouldn't call myself an expert. But every time you get an error, it's an opportunity to learn why to prevent yourself form making that mistake again. Eventually you'll start to see common errors and know exactly where to find them.

Happy coding!

/Users/salvi/rprojects/odot/app/controllers/todo_items_controller.rb:19: syntax error, unexpected '=', expecting keyword_end (SyntaxError) flash [:error] ="There was a problem adding that todo list item."

What about this one? Not sure where to go from here.

Update: I think the error is somewhere in my views/users/_form.html.erb

<%= form_for(@user) do |f| %>
  <% if @user.errors.any? %>
    <div id="error_explanation">
      <h2><%= pluralize(@user.errors.count, "error") %> prohibited this user from being saved:</h2>

<ul>
      <% @user.errors.full_messages.each do |message| %>
        <li><%= message %></li>
      <% end %>
      </ul>
    </div>
  <% end %>

What does the error say? Look specifically at the first line. It tells you which controller and which line to look at. It even tells you that there is something wrong with the "=" on that line.

so im not that obtuse, but Im confused why it's pointing me to the = in the flash :error. I looked on the web and found a similar question about this but not in the case of created users, so that's what lead me to post my _form.html.erb

im almost positive the error is not the equal sign in the controller despite it pointing me to there. I am simply assigning a string message to the assign operator =

ugh ruby is so specific about spaces :( Thanks mate!