frustrating start with ruby

Others on here will be able to give you more technical help but I thought I'd give you some encouragement because your first experience with Ruby seems very similar to mine.

The Ruby on Rails project was the first one that caught my attention, naturally enough because of the social network aspect, and it was the first one I had a go at. However, I found that I just couldn't get it together - I can't really explain it, I'd generate a scaffold and then not be able to find it when I loaded the server and looked at the site or I'd get the thing working, log off for the night, and then the project would be "gone" the next day - that kind of thing. I found it very frustrating.

Thing is, with so much on this site, I had plenty to be going on anyway, and all of it helped when I revisited Jason's Rails course. By the time I got round to it again, I just watched the videos through without trying to recreate the project, completing the quizzes and code challenges as I went, and there came a point where I thought "I think I get this".

I've now been back through and recreated the vast majority of the project. There are still things that take time to grasp - I'm struggling with the picture gallery at the moment - and I guess it's because one wrong turn/typo a day or so ago might only show up today and then I spend ages searching for it.

But I'm now confident enough that I'm building a couple of my own projects with Rails because of how quickly you reap rewards - you generate a project, generate a scaffold, bring Twitter Bootstrap into your assets, add a few classes to your views, next thing you've got a professional-looking, interactive web app in front of you - all of your own making, all in the space of about half an hour.

So, long story short, I can say as someone who considered giving up on Rails a couple of times only to eventually think of it as a favourite: don't give up - try other things, anything that increases your knowledge and confidence will help - but you'll find Rails amazing WHEN it clicks for you.

Hello Louie

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/")

Is certainly an error every new rails programmer goes through :-)

It's telling you that you have made requrest in the browser for a URL, in this case, "/" and it hasn't got a clue what code, controller, to send it to.

I have only ever seen this error when there is a mistake in the config/routes.rb file. The "/" URL is a special case in the routes.rb (you'll see that all other routes have a different syntax). During the tutorial they add this line to the routes.rb, then restart the server ....

root to: 'statuses#index'

... from then on the application knows what to do with "/". The best way to see what is going on is, at the terminal, type

rake routes

These are the URLs that the application knows how to deal with. Any other URL will be treated as a routing error.

Good luck!

Rich