I'm hot on Rails, git, and CodeRetreat

Now that I'm back from CodeMash, where I attended an overview session called "Rails 3 from A to Z", I'm excited about taking a deeper dive into Rails. My first exposure to Ruby was the excellent Ruby Koans PreCompiler session at CodeMash 2010. I didn't complete all the koans at that session, and I didn't follow up and finish them afterward (although I was bitten again by the koan bug when I helped Dianne work on her Scala Koans PreCompiler session during Six Weeks of Scala), but now that I've completed Rails for Zombies, I'm totally going to go back and finish the ruby koans. Maybe before that, I'll finish another Ruby tutorial I started, TryRuby.org. It leads you through lessons and has you enter your answers at a command prompt. After that, I will probably go on to RailsTutorial.org (as recommended at the end of Rails for Zombies.) They have a free tutorial book online and they sell a pdf version and tutorial screencasts.

And after that, I've found a series of interesting articles on programming Rails on Apple's website:

- Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X

- Customizing Rails Applications on Mac OS X

- Deploying Rails Applications on Mac OS X

And somewhere among all that, I'll want to learn the Twitter API, as I have an idea for a site related to Twitter.

Another CodeMash 2011 session that I've taken to heart is the awesome Git Immersion. While my department at work uses Subversion, I've started keeping my experiments in a git repository. And since so Ruby (and other projects) use git and/or github, it will be good to be familiar with git.

And finally, I'll be attending the 2nd Anniversary CodeRetreat in Ann Arbor this Saturday, Jan 29. This will be number 5 for me. Come join us!