At the end of the last few terms, I asked students for their suggestions on how to prosper in this course as well as particular learning tools that they found most helpful. The following are gathered from their final reports.
Tips
- “Ask your mentor specific questions, do not be afraid to get technical.”
- “Use your alumni mentor as much as possible.”
- “Ian!! He was exceptionally knowledgable, helpful, and dedicated to helping us with our project.”
- “Our project mentor, Alex, has been very available and helpful for our project.”
- “Google is our friend.”
- “Some Gems themselves did not have update guides, but for many of them relied on advice from Stack Overflow.”
- “Refer to the Rails tutorial (Hartl) when needed.”
- “We ended up using later portions of the Hartl book (particularly chapters 11 and 12) to help us in creating a “Forgot Password” feature and learning about strong parameters.”
- “Focus on a single feature at a time and get it working.”
- “Ask your fellow group members for help.”
- “Meet with community partner early.”
- “If a feature is broken, check old commits via github to narrow down what isn’t working.”
- “If using a framework, check the github tickets for that framework” …. or gem!
Tools/Resources
- WAVE accessibility tool online
- https://guides.rubyonrails.org
- Using Virtual Environment to get the right version of Ruby
- Launchschool’s Ruby lessons
- Head First Ruby Book (Not the Ruby on Rails edition)
- For reviewing Git: Essential Git Commands Every Developer Should Know
- GitHub Actions with Rails, PostgreSQL, and RSpec
- W3School’s HTML/CSS/Javascript lessons
- Simple pg_search Example (for the pg_search gem)
- pg_search Documentation
- RSpec Rails 3.8 Documentation
- Hartl Tutorials
- YouTube
- StackOverflow