

Business Monkey Wants to Learn Programming: - wtvanhest

I have been reading Hacker News for a few months and noticed the posters are primarily technical in nature.<p>I have limited experience with VB and I have decided to learn Ruby on Rails.<p>I have set out to make a web based application which allows the user to enter a single piece of data and hit submit which then puts the data in a secure database. (I figure this will be a challenge, but something attainable and a good solid start to my programming.)<p>Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to accomplish this?  So far, I have installed Ruby on Rails.
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niketdesai
I am pretty much doing the same thing, and I've found good success using Ruby
Koans, Rails for Zombies and then Rails Tutorial as dustinchilson points out.

The order helped me out though. I started with Ruby Koans which taught me the
fundamentals of Ruby and let me make a program or two without needing to setup
a dev computer...it's an easy way to just get a feel for programming and learn
about why Ruby works in the way it does.

<http://rubykoans.com/>

Next I moved onto Rails for Zombies. This was a great, great site because
again you could learn the fundamentals of rails with a lot of tutorial help in
a completely online browser based environment.

It really helps you get the basics of creating a typical application and it's
fun too.

<http://railsforzombies.org>

And finally, I moved on to Rails Tutorial which is amazing because you
actually learn how to setup your computer to program and deploy code (which I
think is harder than writing it at the moment)!

It goes from zero to deploy and you write a similar app as the one you will
see in Rails for Zombies, but this time from complete scratch. Which is an
amazing lesson that I can't stress enough.

<http://ruby.railstutorial.org>

My recommendation is in that order because it allows for quick wins, overall
understanding (I get MVC now!), and a meaty project that you can feel proud of
at the end.

It's grueling at times to learn, but well worth it. Good luck and try to stay
dedicated and focused. (I've been wavering a bit, but I'll figure it out).

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dustinchilson
To start getting used to the ruby language I recommend using
<http://tryruby.com>.

For rails there are quite a few tutorial sites. Here are a few good ones.
<http://railsforzombies.org/>
<http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html>
<http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book>

If you go through some of these they will talk you through creating a form and
submitting the data to a database. Your application is suite similar to the
typical blog application many tutorials take you through building.

To secure the data stored in the database just think of the data as a password
and store it encrypted using a salt.

Good Luck.

