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Molly Bar
Courses Plus Student 5,925 PointsThe instructor is confusing the hell out of me. He just started this out of the blue. There should be some continuation
The instructor is confusing the hell out of me. He just started this out of the blue. There should be some continuation . I typed the same command and it's giving me errors. It looks like he is skipping a lot of small details in between to be able to follow him. This is online based learning and this can cause a huge problem for students like us. I wish Nick taught every single classes on treehouse. He never misses out any info and he is very thoughtful and serious about teaching.
I have installed too many things from the previous videos and am not able to follow this instructor at all. He already created Project file but hello, do you mind showing us in your command prompt?
6 Answers
David Moore
13,916 PointsMolly, you really have to list the issues one by one and give very detailed info on each. The problem is that Ruby and Rails are hard animals to tame, especially when first starting out. There are quirks with ruby version, rails version, development environment, and production environment. I should point out that the course you linked was developed in ruby 1.9.something with current being 2.1.2 and rails 3.something and current being 4.1.1. You cannot build the tutorial app based on the videos if you are using the current versions. There are too many differences.
Alternately, you could jump into the todo list project as it is built on rails 4 and have a much easier time, but again, I am just speculating since you haven't really listed out the exact issue.
Finally, you should not expect Treehouse to get you up to speed on rails. It is just not capable of being all that you need. Honestly, there isn't a single option I know of online that will. You need to approach rails as a learning process and hit all the tutorials available out there to get as much under your belt as possible. Personally, I started with CodeCademy's course on Ruby to get a better feel for the language. Then I hit Daniel Kehoe's tutorial on setting up a rails environment and his intro tutorials. Next I jumped into Treehouse's courses and was able to get a good feel for things. After spending a ton of time here on Treehouse, I went through Michael Hartl's guide. It is another gem of a tutorial and considered standard reading by most who have gone the self taught route.
So, the point is that if you want to LEARN rails and not just get a peek under the hood, you will need to use multiple resources. Even then, you will probably just be to a point where you are informed enough to know how dumb you are. Once you get to this stage, it's time to hop on github and start reading other's code and figuring out how real things work, start listening to the Ruby Rogues podcast, go back and watch all the Railscast episodes (which are old, so you need to have an idea as to what the new versions of rails have changed, such as hashrocket symbols vs colons and strong parameters), and so on.
Finally, you are going to have questions. Get used to finding answers. Stack Overflow is your friend, just search for your question before asking. If you are not yet signed up there, do so right now. You are not going to get out of this without spending some quality time over there. You can also use the Reddit /r/rails and /r/rubyonrails subreddits for info, questions, and a look into what others are actively working on.
I hope this helps. I'm more than happy to offer something more specific to your situation but I need a cut/paste of your error to even know where to begin.
Dustin Matlock
33,856 PointsHi Molly, I've not yet taken the course but you might be able to get some more immediate solutions on the forum through the content tags: Ruby and Generate a Rails Application. If I remember correctly, others had a bit of trouble with the installs as well.
Molly Bar
Courses Plus Student 5,925 PointsI am looking for outside help and searching all over google as well. Treehouse is slowing me down by having these sorts of instructors. We need quality instructors who have to keep in mind that it's online based and not real time and people would be learning even couple of years down the road from the time they produce a tutorial. I don't know if you have taken any of Nick's classes but he is on top of things and Treehouse made a great investment by hiring him. Rest, I am not too sure. Struggled with JavaScript but then thanks to Google/Youtube, I was able to move forward. But now with Ruby, I don't know what to do. I searched here already, not finding solutions for these problems which is actually nothing more than little hint or info which the teacher could've easily taken care of. :(
Dustin Matlock
33,856 PointsIf you posted what exactly you're having an issue with that would make it easier for someone later on to answer the question.
Molly Bar
Courses Plus Student 5,925 PointsDustin, there are too many things to list here. Listing one by one here and hoping that someone would be able to answer after days or months later is just a waste of time. I will learn Ruby else where ( I am sure there are quality courses else where). I have just switched my track to android app. It's sad but I don't want to slow down and fall behind. Thanks for your help and concern.
Björn Steneram
5,523 PointsIf your looking for another course to learn the basics of Ruby on Rails i recommend the free course over at CodeSchool called Rails for Zombies - http://railsforzombies.org/ . But i highly recommend you to do the rails track from the beginning. If your struggling with JavaScript your going to struggle with Ruby and Rails to and Android is another giant step upwards in complexity. I also recommend you to find your local ruby and rails meetup group and sign up there. Often these meetup groups has a Rails installfest where you can get help at setting up your developing environment and get a chance to create your first rails app and use stuff like git and heroku to get that first app up and running. After that i felt it was much more easier to follow along with the courses here on Treehouse. This will also give you a chance to meet the Rails community and that is a important step if you want to become serious as a Rails developer.
Just my 2 cents! :)
Molly Bar
Courses Plus Student 5,925 PointsHi Bjorn, thanks for your reply. JavaScript wasn't that hard for me to figure out but yes, the javascript instructor wasn't easy to follow on treehouse. Ruby instructor is basically all over the places and if Ruby is that complex, then Treehouse should put someone who can break it down for online learner. I completed all these hours for ruby rails track just to abandone it. I am getting very frustrated here at treehouse. They should have better instructors than these. I would definitely follow your advice. Thanks a ton!!!
Howard DeForest
7,404 PointsHello I am having this same issue with following the tutorial. I believe it is cause he is using a Mac vs a windows application. As i read down below It stated how to make a dir projects by doing mkdir [directory_name] so i just wrote in mkdir projects. that sloved that issue. took me a bit to figure out how to get myself into the projects folder which i finally remembered was cd projects. Anyways i was finally thinking i had it figured out, now my command prompts says start command Prompt with ruby in the title area. but now i'm having the issue of it showing me errors when I go to make the server. I typed in rails new treebook and it throws back
ruby 1.9.3p545 (2014-02-24) [i386-mingw32]
rails new treebook C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/dependency.rb:247:in
to_specs': Co uld not find railties (>= 0) amongst [bigdecimal-1.1.0, io-console-0.3, json-1.5 .5, minitest-2.5.1, rake-0.9.2.2, rdoc-3.9.5] (Gem::LoadError) from C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/dependency.rb:256:into_spec' from C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:1231:ingem' from C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.9.3/bin/rails:22:in<main>'
so this is where i am stuck
Molly Bar
Courses Plus Student 5,925 PointsMolly Bar
Courses Plus Student 5,925 PointsHi David, Thanks for your reply. You have stated many helpful info that I can utilize in my Ruby learning path. I was actually following a track (for almost a year due to time limitation). After being so frustrated about getting started with the course "Build a simple Ruby on Rails app", I had to quit to move on to something else that I can follow. I can't name the track that I just quit but it required, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ruby part was the last. I think Treehouse made some changes because I can no longer see that particular track I was in. If you follow the videos, you will know how this new instructor jumps without giving enough info. I had to switch to Rails Development by Jim and still the online simulated Console they provided is having issues loading. I see a lot of technical issues here. I know I am going to end up learning this anyway but I am trying to work it out with TreeHouse since I can always trace back to what I have learned so far. I guess as we move to more advanced material, it gets harder and harder to find the perfect teacher. Also, I guess I shouldn't expect more from distant/online learning. I just have to try different tracks to see which one is easy to follow.
Thanks once again!