Today I finished up the One Month Rails course in exactly 15 days. I was basically a Weekend Warrior, in that I didn’t work on this much during the work week. I think it was a substantial course and worth the $20 that I paid for access to it.
Pros:
+ Getting me setup with an environment, deploying to Git and Heroku was probably the best part about this. Compared to Codecademy or other such sites, this course actually got me started on the path to making a real app and showing it to the world within the very first lesson. That is a huge motivator to keep going, and also gave me essential knowledge that I need to start app #2.
+ His teaching was slow and his voice is calming and his delivery is great. I like how he explained why we’re doing everything.
+ I feel like I have a solid knowledge of searching the web for answers to things and importing gems that might be useful to my project.
+ I got a brief glimpse into Ruby syntax, though I don’t necessarily understand it yet.
+ I have a working app at the end that is basically Pinterest minus the boards that I can show to people. This is exciting.
Con:
+ I don’t think it taught me how to code, at all. It taught me the basics of creating an app with Rails and how to edit/modify things. I feel like I could build any number of apps and I could probably Google for the code snippets required to add just about any functionality. Do I feel that would make me a “Rails developer”? No. I don’t really understand how to write any Ruby code.
I liked this course. It gave me the knowledge that I need to start making another app, once I come up with an idea.
My next steps:
Do the Ruby course at CodeSchool and Codecademy so that I can understand the syntax of that language better. Read Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby. Then, I’ll do Michael Hartl’s Rails tutorial. After that, I’m going to build something and this will give me time to figure out exactly what. =)
cuppy.code() 
Another great ruby resource is RubyMonk (http://rubymonk.com/). I would give that a try as well before Michael Hartl’s tutorial.
I’m about done with Chapter 9 in the rails tutorial, so I only have a bit more to go. After that i’m going to go through the Treehouse courses then the Codeschool Ruby & Javascript courses. I think after that I should be able to build one of my personal projects!
I found it pretty lame that some of the tutorial focused creating an advertisement page for his product. Pretty clever to get hundreds of users to publish LEARN ONE MONTH RAILS AT THIS URL pages to heroku and github. Could have totally gone the Hello World or my Test Page route.
Thanks for your advise, helpfull mat I ask if you work on aWindows PC or MAC?
Hey Tami – I’m about half way through One Month Rails and totally agree – I don’t think I’m learning how to really code in ruby, but I definitely think this was tremendously valuable to get setup, learn how to use Sublime, GitHub, Heroku, install gems, etc. Good luck with your future learning!
Hey, was just looking up reviews for the one month rails course, thanks for the review! I’m disappointed to hear it sounds like there wasn’t too much meat on the bones. I just finished a teaching job in Thailand and have a bit of free time on my hands. I’ve been trying to understand coding and must have started coding 6 or 7 different times. It’s been nice having a bit more time on my hands, but as of now I’ve been trying to start up a gaming blog while traveling. The coding for it has been interesting on WordPress, it’s the first time I’ve had a chance to get my hands dirty with a bit of coding. My site is affiliated with my girlfriends, saveandcontinue.com. Her blog is coming along a bit nicer then mine, she has a bit more understanding of coding then I do XP
It’s funny you’d mentioned code academy, this article — http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130716014745-7374576-why-you-need-to-know-code-and-how-you-can-learn-in-a-month — actually commented on how frustrating code academy was and how the creater of one month rails was different then that. To be fair, she does say that the site had gave more grammar then a story.
From one beginning programmer to another, good luck :)!
PS – My site is ‘gamersabroad’ 🙂
Hi Tami,
Did you try the codeschool or Hartl’s book? Just checking in to see what you learned in your process of learning. I’m putting together a course to help people become devs and am interested in the usefulness of tools and roadblocks encountered.
thx!
– Philip