RR 316 Learning Rails 5 with Mark Locklear

On today’s episode, we have Learning Rails 5 with Mark Locklear. Mark works for Extension.org. The discussion ranges from the introduction of Learning Rails 5 to the strategies that most successful students have for learning Rails. Stay tuned!

[00:01:30] – Introduction to Mark Locklear

Mark Locklear works for Extension.org, a USDA-funded or government-funded organization. He serves the Cooperative Extension Service but a lot of people know about 4-H Youth Group. They got a handful of websites that they maintain that are mostly Ruby on Rails-based.

He has been with Extension.org for about 3 years. He is also a staff at a community college mostly doing Rails and IT things. He is also an adjunct instructor at the same community college. He was mostly doing quality assurance and testing work but moved into development work in the last 7-8 years.

Questions for Mark Locklear

[00:03:00] – You authored Learning Rails 5?

It was an actually an update on an existing book – Learning Rails 3. Mark is an adjunct instructor and used that book. He contacted the developers or the original authors in O’Reilly so he can update the book. He updated a lot of the syntax and rewrote a couple of chapters. He also wrote the authentication chapter from scratch.

[00:04:15] – What’s unique about your book?

For Mark, there are all kinds of learners out there. There’s nothing necessarily unique about this book. It approaches Rails from a standpoint of having really no development skill at all. The only assumption would be that reader knows some HTML and basic things like for loops and conditional statements.

[00:05:30] – Has Rails gotten more complicated?

That was one of the challenges with this book. The original version of the book didn’t have any API stuff, any Action Cables, or anything like that. But now, we’re looking on adding chapters on those things. Mark doesn’t think Rails is hard to learn now. It’s been pretty backward compatible over the years. It looks very much like it did 5 or 10 years ago.

Dave thinks Rails started to standardize a lot of things and with Convention over Configuration, a lot of it is taking care of it for you. The also added a lot of new features like Active Job (Rails 4), Action Cable (Rails 5), Webpack (Rails 5.1). He think that when someone gets accustomed to it, it’s almost second nature. Thanks to Convention over Configuration and the support for the community.

According to DHH, Rails is not for beginners. It is a toolkit for professional web developers to get stuff done. But Brian disagrees that it’s not for beginners. It’s not so much that it’s harder to learn but it’s just a little harder to get started with. There’s just lots of different ways you can do in a Rails application by using RSpec, Cucumber, etc.

[00:12:20] - What are the core fundamental things to know in order to write Rails apps?

Mark spends a week on testing in his class. He focuses more on the Model View Controller paradigm. He also used RSpec and the basics of CRUD. Those things are transferable across whatever framework that they choose to work in. He also want to hit testing, sessions in cookies and user authentication.

[00:18:30] - Is there an approach for people to enhance their experience as they learn Rails?

Jerome believes in the “just keep it simple” methodology. When it comes to Rails, just learn Rails. Just focus on CRUD apps. Focus on the entirety of the framework, and not only on Rails, focus more on Ruby.

Another suggestion from Brian is to start cracking open the Ruby source code, Rails source code and see how things work under the hood. Look at things and see if you can reproduce them or write your own implementations as you learn.

[00:24:30] – What are the strategies of your most successful students that you’ve had for learning Rails?

In Mark’s class, they have final projects with very strict requirements, basically going back and incorporating everything that they’ve le