

Follow the journey of three beginners who are learning to code - pocha
http://www.codelearn.org/learn-ruby-on-rails

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petercooper
I'm happy to see them going ahead with this. Codelearn has some interesting
technology under the hood and deserves a bit more recognition than it seems to
have had so far. (Disclaimer: I've had a preview of their platform as I often
write about Ruby/Rails stuff.)

Another thing to bear in mind is that this almost harks back to how the Rails
community was in 2004-2006. A ton of people blogging about the things they'd
learnt and found out. Then they became experts, Twitter was born, and not so
many people blog "hey, I learnt this about Rails!" anymore.. :-)

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darrellsilver
Intriguing! What's the tech under the hood?

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pocha
Its Ruby on Rails itself :).

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darrellsilver
Neat idea! We'll be following along as we've found students do better with a
bit more structure than this program provides, but there are so many ways of
learning it may work well.

What I like most is the personal help. It promises not just a video but
guidance to the _best_ video based on where the "noob" is located... that's
awesome.

I would say that "passively by dropping comments to the blog" feels like a low
bar (but maybe I'm reading too literally?). The response rates to questions
must be prompt – the difference between getting an answer in 30 seconds and 10
minutes is huge for me, and I've been writing software for 15 years. It's only
worse for beginners.

For our students at Thinkful (<http://www.thinkful.com/>) getting human
contact promptly is key... our students only like banging their heads against
the wall for so many minutes before getting demotivated!

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catchmrbharath
> The response rates to questions must be prompt – the difference between
> getting an answer in 30 seconds and 10 minutes is huge for me, and I've been
> writing software for 15 years. It's only worse for beginners.

I think the there is a lot of learning involved when you are trying to figure
out an answer. If things are answered very quickly they won't try at all and
ask the person, even though the answer is very simple.

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darrellsilver
I agree in the principle you're after (independence beats dependent on someone
else) but not the method.

Quick response rates help people feel not _alone_. And that's really really
important because alone is too close to helpless is too close to powerless is
too close to giving up.

To develop independence you need a good teacher. That's one who helps you
understand _why_ the answer is the answer, rather than just gives you the
answer. Teach a person to fish... basically.

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imdsm
I agree with this. When I was first learning to code I was ten, and my mentor
would show me the solution, and I would go 'aaaah I get it now', and then he's
ask me if I really understood it, which I would sometimes reply with 'not
really, no'.

Copy paste compile, a terrible way to "learn".

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groundCode
I'm a touch sceptical here - while I appreciate a noobs perspective whenever
I'm starting something new, I prefer to see something that encourages best
practice - a mix of experience through the eyes of a noob would be better in
my opinion.

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darrellsilver
Agreed. But note that it's not all "noobs" helping "noobs"... there's someone
who knows chiming in with directional support along the way. That's a big
difference.

Coursera tries "peer learning"... commonly referred to in the forums as "the
blind leading the blind."

At Thinkful we definitely see a benefits from both peers and experts...

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tmh88j
I'm very comfortable using CakePHP. I've built many apps using knockout.js on
top of it, extensively used jQuery and AJAX throughout and have used both
MySQL and MongoDB to drive the data.

For someone like me who is confident in their abilities of another MVC
framework, how much of a learning curve is involved transitioning over to ROR
(or any other MVC for that matter)? Has anyone switched from say Django,
CakePHP or MVC4 over to Rails, or vice versa?

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bakli
I switched from Django to Cake to ROR. There isn't much difference
structurally, as all of them are after all MVC architecture, but there are
little subtle things which bring about the difference in feel and usability.
Cake is heavily inspired from Rails but it doesn't focus much on command line
as Rails does. For any common command you have which will add files, there is
a command to in Rails to bring about that change and generate ALL THE
RECOMMENDED files at once. These include test files, migrations, css, js,
helpers etc. This makes life much much easier. Plus, ruby feels much pleasant
when compared to PHP and thus, you won't regret switching to here. It'll take
2 days to be able to create a workable app. Although you'll find a new concept
in Coffee script (Which is basically using ruby syntax for JavaScript), but
you can easily switch back to JS if you want by removing the extension. Come
over to the dark side, you'll love it.

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tmh88j
I've been thinking about giving rails a chance. I'm in the middle of a project
using Cake right now, so I think when I finish it I'll start checking out ROR.

> For any common command you have which will add files, there is a command to
> in Rails to bring about that change and generate ALL THE RECOMMENDED files
> at once

Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but it sounds an awful lot like Cake's bake
functionality.

For you ROR guys, here's a short tutorial on baking with CakePHP.

[http://www.jamesfairhurst.co.uk/posts/view/baking_with_cakep...](http://www.jamesfairhurst.co.uk/posts/view/baking_with_cakephp)

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bakli
Yes, it's very close to Bake functionality, but has many more commands. For
example, if I remember correctly, there are no migration files in Cake and you
have to do the changes in database manually. Try the migration feature of
Rails, you'll never go back again.

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callmeed
Good idea, questionable execution:

* Should have had a female in the group

* The first guy isn't "learning to code", he's a programmer learning a new language/framework

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jimmaswell
Why does it matter if a female didn't end up being in it?

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callmeed
Seems obvious–having a female in the group might ease some
anxiety/intimidation (which the community has caused) of other females who
visit the site and want to follow their progress.

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mnicole
While I agree that it would have been nice, I don't think it was an oversight.
In addition to the link posted on how they found people, it's also a bit of a
double-edged sword as women are less likely to apply for these types of
things. This is their very first attempt; it's experimental. I'm sure when
they have more faith in their product/the training, they can spend more time
trying to find people from varying backgrounds to highlight.

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mnicole
What a great idea; a lot less intimidating than doing it on your own or one-
on-one. Interested in seeing how this plays out.

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PeterJ
I am excited to see how this go.Don't mean to pick side but I am rooting for
the kid. I think he has a lot of potential.

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kmlymi
This is pretty interesting to me as the thought process while learning is
often lost in other online tutorial/courses.

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to3m
Is `noob' considered acceptable terminology?

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itsybitsycoder
It used to be that "noob" was rude (referring to a new or incompetent person
who is stupid and irritating) and "newb" was not (referring to a new person
who should be treated kindly and helped along). Maybe the meanings are
starting to blend together?

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jholman
Maybe there was a time in your linguistic community when those words meant
that. I suggest that this is not universal. I've seen lots of people in games
use "newb" in a profanity-laden attack, and I've seen people people say things
like "c'mon, don't grief the noobs, pick on someone your own size".

What's the difference between "geek" and "nerd"? Ask five language
communities, get five different answers. Or ten answers, if you ask the same
five language communities again two years later.

When you use slang in a new speech community, you need to expect that to your
listener, it probably _doesn't mean what you think it means_ , especially in
fine nuance like you're claiming exists between "newb" and "noob" (or "n00b"
or "newbie" or "nooby" or "noobie" or ...)

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itsybitsycoder
Maybe not universal, but certainly very common.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbie#Variants>

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jholman
Uh. The relevant sentence of that WP article has, as its citation, a Forbes
article about gamers. You take Forbes seriously, as an authority on gamer
culture?

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itsybitsycoder
You were making it sound as though this were some niche thing that only
happened in my particular social group. I was simply showing that this isn't
the case. It's not as though there's likely to be peer-reviewed studies on
this, but here's some more links, if you'd like:

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Noobs%20vs.%2...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Noobs%20vs.%20Newbs&defid=4307260)

<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Noob>

<http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20060823>

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csense
Why are they learning an awful language like Ruby on Rails instead of an
awesome language like Python?

