Does the Web Dev Learning Adventure Go into More Detail?

Scaffolds are what many developers start with when fleshing out a Rails app. You can remove these later, and most do.

Don't spend too much time over-thinking certain aspects. Just get through the course and see what you know on the other side.

Thanks, Charles.

That's what concerns me though, you say that most devs remove the bits they don't need later, but I don't even know which 'bits' get added, or indeed what a scaffold really does.

I'll certainly see the course through, I just hope it'll position me better for building some of the projects I have in mind.

Not super important at this very second, the universe always has a way of giving us the information we need at the time :)

You can do it!!!

Good call Charles, thanks!

I learned a lot by not using scaffolds. I may be not in the position to give this kind of advice, but here's how I learned how a Rails app basically works:

First generate a brand new app. Then, before you do anything else, write an integration test, that tries to get to a certain path (e.g. posts/index). Run the test – it will fail, but it will also give you message saying how it failed. Probaly something along the lines of "no route 'posts/index'"). So you go to config/routes.rb and add the route. Run the test again and chances are it will complain about a missing controller, then a missing template.

By going through this process step by step you'll learn about how the a browser request is processed by the MVC architecture, whilst practicing TDD. A good motto of TDD to keep in mind is to write tests for the code you wish you had. :)

I don't know if this makes any sense… just some advice from student to student :)

That's awesome, thanks Philipp.

Fortunately, I did a little bit of the Michael Hartl book so I can see the power of TDD, I'll certainly have a go at the method you've suggested.

I've actually found the biggest learning experiences have come from fixing things when they go wrong, and having come from a frontend background, one thing I've noticed is there is a LOT that can go wrong with even the most subtle change!