Last night I presented a skillswap, “Introduction to Rails”. This was meant to be a fairly quick overview for people who’ve done some web development before, but are completely new to Rails (and Ruby). The event was presented in two parts. First, a set of slides about what Rails is, why it works and a brief overview of Ruby. Then, a practical session.
For the practical, I installed Locomotive and we ran through a quick session of getting started with a rails application, building a model and putting up some scaffolding on top of that. There were only five macs, so people had to work together, which probably helped. I have to issue a huge thanks to lighthouse for the opportunity to use the fantastic venue.
I did actually have further slides and handouts, which progressed the practical, but it was already getting on for 20:30, so it seemed wiser to halt whilst things were still going well.
Like all live things, not all went to plan. The main annoyance was the fact that Locomotive-generated projects (well, Rails really) default to using MySQL. A quick switch to SQLite made things work a lot better. Servers can be a pain when you’re trying to get things running.
The slides and handout are available for download.
- Introduction to Rails (Keynote, 1.5Mb)
- Introduction to Rails (PDF, 776Kb)
- Introduction to Rails Handout (PDF, 68Kb)
- Introduction to Rails Handout (Pages, 36Kb)
Also many thanks to Jane for the kind words. 🙂
Jabbering Giraffe 