w5d3 - Going off the Rails

    Rails, done! At least for now… I have a sneaking suspicion it will be back. I spent the first part of the day finishing up the Rails Lite project that we started yesterday. I was done pretty early, but I spent some time going back over older sections and trying to understand them a little better. I feel more comfortable now with all of the hocus pocus that Rails does for you, and I think once we get into more complex application development, it will be a huge help to have spent the last 2 days dissecting Rails the way we did. But, that’s behind us for now, it time to move on the some JavaScript!

    It feels weird to just completely shift gears and deRail the Ruby train, but it makes sense. It’s time to add on to that knowledge base with some good old fashioned, tried and true JavaScript. The first part of our prep was to do a tutorial from , CodeAcademy. I’ve used the site in the past, and in fact I used it to help me learn Ruby prior to starting App Academy, and I’m a big fan, but going through the beginner JavaScript material was pretty dull, almost torturous. I think that’s partly a testament to how well I already know Ruby. There are a lot of shared concepts between the languages, and I’m sure I picked up on things a lot faster, solely because they were already very familiar concepts. Still, I know it won’t be easy to just start writing JavaScript. There are certainly enough nuances to keep me on my toes. I even got stuck a few times doing the tutorials today because I kept trying to do “joe = Person.new(…)” (a la Ruby) instead of “joe = new Person(…)”. It’s the small things that are probably going to be the hardest to adjust to, but even so, I’m excited to see what new functionality JavaScript brings us.