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Ruby

Posted by Toby Howarth
Toby Howarth
323 Points

Ruby on Rails Simple App

I have joined treehouse to learn Ruby on Rails and am having issues with the building a simple app project.

When it comes to the creating authentication badge and the customizing forms badge there seems to be a discrepency or I am going mad.

At the end of the creating authentication badge everything is working fine and I have followed every instruction and it all looks fine.

However when we start the forms badge the first lesson instructions cause the app to break. I have done 2 run throughs and the same thing happens each time.

I am a complete beginner to Ruby on Rails and thought this would be a good starting point but its just causing me frustration as it goes so well to a point and then breaks.

Some of my queries are

  • I deleted the statuses at the end of creating authentication so why are there still 2 in the forms badge?

  • In creating authentication, after I go to users/sign_up for the first time the lesson tells me to go back there but I can not as I am already logged in. As a complete beginner I was baffled and got completely lost.

-Finally the errors that Jim gets at the start of the forms badge are not happening for me.

Sorry to moan but I was really enjoying the lessons and these problems have been a complete pain and twice the app has broken because of clarity in instructions

I am really enjoying using treehouse and just want to finish this project :)

4 Answers

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

You didn't mention what your background is with programming.

Personally I find Ruby on Rails to have a bit of a steep learning curve as a first language. Ruby on the other hand is a great first language.

You might consider working your way through the Ruby Fundamentals deep dive and perhaps supplementing it with the Ruby course from the good people at Codecademy.

Toby Howarth
Toby Howarth
323 Points
Toby Howarth
Toby Howarth
323 Points

Thanks James

I am new to programming and was hoping the simple rails app would be a good starting point.

My main concern is the inconsistencies between tutors and the lessons. I am going to go through the other tutorials for now and come back to it :)

Juan Cano
Juan Cano
2,844 Points
Juan Cano
Juan Cano
2,844 Points

Hey Toby!

What you say is true, there are some minor problems in that project. Later on, there are some problems in the testing part that are more difficult to solve, I wrote them down in a thread on this forum.

I agree with James, Ruby on Rails (RoR) is not a programming language in itself, is a web framework for Ruby, and it could be easier for you if you learned Ruby before RoR.

I've been following the tutorials for the Web Developer Learning Adventure. The suggested path is that you learn RoR before Ruby and after a short introduction to programming with Javascript, and the RoR videos are a little bit difficult for someone with no experience. Luckily for me I already know how to program and I'm familiar with another web framework, Django, so I can solve some of these issues on my own, but it can be frustrating if this is your first time dealing with these problems.

As for your questions, the first one is because there are 2 different development environments, Jason's and Jim's. This may be a little bit messy for beginners but it's a good way of teaching how to work with other people using a code repository (GitHub). When you update your code using git pull you get only the changes in the source code, not in the data. Jason deleted his sample statuses but Jim didn't so when Jim is showing some examples his data is still there. By the way, if you are working alone on this project, you don't need to do a git pull every time, you already have the most recent version of the code.

The second problem has to do with session information. Almost all of the modern browsers have a way of remembering you in different web pages, this is called session information. These session information is stored, in this case, as a cookie so every time you direct your browser to your page (Treebook) the site will get the cookie and restore your session. They don't teach you how to log out until some lessons ahead so what you can do is delete all the cookies from localhost or 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1. This is done in different ways depending on your browser.

If you are doing this on Chrome you can open the Developer Tools, go to the section Resources and on the left select Cookies > localhost (or 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1, there will probably be only one sub-category). On the list on the right you'll see a list of cookies, delete all of them.

Hope this helps.