Rails for Zombies

Just been looking at Rails for Zombies again in preparation for my forthcoming interview with Makers Academy (because it’s never too late and you can always do more).

It strikes me what a difference a few months of Ruby and a course redesign makes. Now when faced with the first set of exercises I wasn’t, as before, struggling to keep up and make sense. Instead I was interrogating what was going on - “Wait, Zombie.find(1) - what’s it finding? Capital Z… is it a class? Let’s find out Zombie.class => Class - cool, so the tables are represented by different classes in Ruby… what sort of methods does a Zombie have anyway? Zombie.find(1).methods…” and so on.

This was great - using the techniques I’d picked up from Ruby Monk and Ruby Koans to work out for myself what was going on (and not have an instructor tell me). By the end of the course (and the first part of the sequel) I had suddenly gained an insight not only into what Rails can do, but how it does it, and why it does it the way it does. I could also see what MVC was, not just as a theory but literally in the code - this is the controller, this is a model.

The guys at Codeschool have changed the course since my first attempt at it — they describe it as Rails for Zombies: Redux — and it’s a huge improvement. Definitely worth a look. And it’s FREE!