Short version: I’m thrilled at being here because Mike Clark and Dave Thomas really know how to:
- teach a class,
- Ruby On Rails works from the inside out,
- work together, and,
- make the class fun and exciting.
Longer: I’m learning a lot and we haven’t even gotten to the advanced stuff which will take most of tomorrow. If you think that reading their book and some of the web tutorials and blogs is sufficient yet haven’t been able to build or deploy an application more complicated than a single table CRUDer, and the schedule and money is right, then you ought to jump on the first available class.
Flickr photo group for Rails Studio Pasadena
Making the time even more enjoyable and educational are the other guys in the class; yes, sad to say, there are 39 men and zero women in attendance. I’m actually carpooling with Dan Shafer, yes the one who used to be one of the high editorial dudgeons at CNet and who’s written 62 (mostly computer) books. The two of us, Kelly Felkins, Mike Hartl and Arnie G had dinner together last night at the Panda Inn. Only about a quarter of the people are local, or at least live close enough to drive from home each day, several are from the Bay Area, Dan’s from Monterey, others are here from Atlanta, Hawaii (Arnie, who works at the Fujitsu Observatory there), Portland, Seattle and Utah.
Earthlink is providing the classroom, presumably in exchange for a few of their staff’s tuition, and it’s a nice facility with plenty of space for each student and two big wall screens so the projected material (presentation, code, sample apps) are very easy to see. Not surprisingly, about half the laptops are Macs.
Some more or less random remarks and observations, mainly from Mike and Dave:
- History: Why do programming languages almost uniformly require parentheses, brackets and semi-colons in source code? Fortan strips white space, requiring parenthesis and brackets, and everyone followed suit; Ruby doesn’t require them but supports their use.
- The Home Depot rule: buy four feet of rubber and beat the guy senseless (this is for programmers who do something stupid like redefining arithmetic, just because they can in Ruby)
- Ruby exceptions are the way God intended exceptions to be
- Eight million ways something can go wrong but it doesn’t because nobody would reasonably do it (see the Home Depot rule)
- It’s ruby, nothing can go wrong
- Ajax is now a marketing term, not an acronym: Making browsers suck less. Interact for humans, not computers.
Enough, I have homework for tomorrow’s session.
BillSaysThis 