It has been a long time since I attended university, and so I’ve forgotten how we don’t learn everything in one go. It takes time, going over all the information. I’ve decided to take it step by step and reread all the lessons relevant to bulding our sinatra portfolio project. I feel like looking over all the important lectures and lessons gives me a solid foundation to complete my project without fear of failure.
I’ve been on and off about learning coding, and recently I decided to look into the lessons more carefully. We get a ton of information, some of which is repetitive. So far throughout my coursework I’ve picked up on how we are being taught this stuff. First we learned basic ruby which set the ground for using this knowledge in new ways in order to apply in Sinatra or even Object-Orientation. I wish they showed us the grand scheme for coding in ruby. I feel like if, right off the bat we could be taught that all patterns of building programs follow the logic of explaining what we want to be done in more abstarct ways.
I find ORMs interesting because they help make life easier in coding. Object Relational Mapping (ORM) uses what we learned earlier in Object Oriented Ruby and maps data through SQL. It follows the rule, DRY. Just another way of having what we write, as abstract as it may be, return to us almost every time the data we are looking for.
For my CLI project, I chose to scrape the National Science Foundation website for articles on new discoveries. On the initial page where the articles are listed I scraped the name, date and url as object attributes. Thre was one problem though, because in my code when I go “one level deep” I ask the user if s/he would like to view an excerpt of the article picked in the cli from the printed list.
Learning about Ruby Concepts makes life easier with coding, not just because you can communicate with other coders but because once you understand why the command is named the way it is, it fits with the whole conception of its mechanism. For example an Object in Ruby has class and instances, and instance methods and so on. It helps when writing code to remember what needs to be done to run the code properly. I know when I took my first coding course in Python it seemed like a daunting task. There were so many things I didn’t understand about coding (like why does it work this way?…). The reading in the lessons is very helpful because it tells us the overarching concept behind everything we code. It’s basically learning how Ruby thinks. Which I like because once I know how Ruby thinks I can improve on how Ruby thinks :)