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Zyad Sherif
11,420 PointsWhich MVC to start with?
Ok am really frustrated by the amount of effort I put in trying to get my head around some MVC frameworks yet my output is Zero so far.
I am an experienced front-end developer with 4 years of experience in the field I write good javascript, and I also develop WordPress themes.
So my experience is mainly HTML/CSS/JS and some basic PHP that gets me going with WordPress.
I've tried to understand Node.js as it seemed to be a javascript backend but there is not one single framework that has proper documentation and tutorials to get newbies do something useful, Node.js people are just showing off skills of developing everything they want in lightning speed relying on packages that they've worked with hundred times before and since it's my first time hearing anything about it I get overwhelmed and start looking for something else.
Rails on the other hand seems very cool with its generators and stuff like this but once you need to start doing something other than what's in the tutorial Ruby and its dependencies will give you hard time.
Laravel seemed the answer making something like rails happen in the PHP world and while I have some experience with PHP I thought this is it, I've read the full book written by one of the creators of Laravel, and I wasn't able to do anything useful AGAIN.
What's wrong in this picture I kinda really need some advice on picking up a proper programming language with a decent framework that just delivers ... I've wasted about a year and half trying to get going.
I've made extensive searches and read hundreds of tutorials, books, and treehouse courses and I would really appreciate some help here.
2 Answers
Stone Preston
42,016 PointsHonestly this tutorial is a great start. I hate to say it but It is quite a bit better than the treehouse tutorials. He doesnt use scaffolding, the section on testing is awesome, and he walks you through step by step. I would take a look at that. It is really long, which is a downside, but its an awesome tutorial and the best one I have ever come across for something as complicated as rails development
James Barnett
39,199 PointsFrameworks are designed to take a programmer with a few years of full time work and make it so they "write less and do more". Unless you've spent a few years doing it the hard way, it's all deep magic that's kinda hopeless to figure out.
First up, I've looked around like you and I've come to the conclusion that only Ruby on Rails seems to have enough traction to have a enough newbie-friendly resources created for it.
I've written my some of my thoughts on learning ruby on rails
I'd make one note ...
Lots of people have posted on the forum about issues they are having with version differences with gems with the Ruby on Rails course. My suggestion is to always use same major version of software of any tutorial you are following.
Given the number of gems used in the Build a Basic Rails Application course, if you keep hitting a wall having to debug issues related to version differences, you might want to consider waiting until it's been updated to the current version of Rails. In the mean time I'd suggest instead to check out code school's Rails for Zombies course.
Zyad Sherif
11,420 PointsThanks James Barnett for your response, you wrote great tips in that other discussion. My problem mainly with Rails tutorials so far is that Ruby isn't that easy to pick up as they claim, and all of the tutorials revolve around scaffolding not really telling you what's happening underneath.
And speaking of that Rails is still having problems in deployment, not easy to setup and some hosting requires you to deal with specific databases like Heroku that doesn't support Sqlite3 and will force you to use PostgreSQL.
However I do agree that RoR people have managed to make a buzz around the framework by the famous type of tutorial of making a blog in under 15 min, bunch of scaffolds along with twitter bootstrap styling and bam you now think you're a kickass programmer.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsIt sounds like you are trying to do too much too soon. The key to learning to program is leaning one thing at a time.
You've got to learn to crawl before you learn to walk. So rather than worry about every Rails tutorial out there, I'd focus on spending a few months getting good with Ruby and solving problems with Ruby.
I'd say you don't need to learn about deploying code or the differences (very important) differences between sqlite and postgres.
You need about those things once you've actually built something worth deploying, which usually means you've made a few apps with Rails and your a couple months in.
The brilliance of Code School's approach they aren't trying to teach you about using some need gem or how to deploy your demo site to heroku. The goal with Rails for Zombies is to learn Rails.
Zyad Sherif
11,420 PointsZyad Sherif
11,420 PointsYeah I pretty much went half way through the book then got frustrated, I can almost list every resource that's out there for learning RoR.
Thanks a lot for your response and yes the treehouse Rails course sucks, it's abusing testing and making me forget about what the actual program looks like, tests should be an advanced topic.