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Ruby Build a Todo List Application with Rails 4 Build a Todo List Application with Rails 4 Write Our First Tests

James Joyce
James Joyce
3,551 Points
Posted by James Joyce
James Joyce
3,551 Points

Advice on track/course with better overview of Ruby Syntax

I'm having difficulty keeping up and understanding the syntax in this "Write our first tests" video. I went onto watch the next two videos and I am getting even more lost. I already watched the ruby basics videos as part of the rails development track but those didn't seem to cover all concepts and syntax leading up to this video. Would you recommend that I complete all or part of the Learn Ruby track before continuing on the rails development track? Thank you for your help.

1 Answer

Steve Hunter
Steve Hunter
57,712 Points
Steve Hunter
Steve Hunter
57,712 Points

Hi James,

I also found some parts of this course quite quick and difficult to take in. I found the best way through this was to muddle through, Googling errors and trying to work out the problems. The error messages that ruby/rails throws are quite helpful (sometimes!) and the Community pages here are very good for solving issues.

I've not done the older courses on Rails here but have gained a rough knowledge from other online resources. Notably, Michael Hartl has a very good tutorial; it used to be free, it may not be now.

Learning the Learn Ruby track can't do any harm, however!

Keep working on it and shout if you get stuck.

Steve.

James Joyce
James Joyce
3,551 Points
James Joyce
James Joyce
3,551 Points

Hi Steve,

Thanks for getting back to me. My tests were consistently passing and I was able to copy the syntax by pausing the video frequently. I suppose I just wish the video or videos in general on treehouse(and beyond) described the syntax in more depth consistently to reinforce what a function is, versus a method, versus a variable is and so on, and why in different declarations you use periods or semicolons, parenthesis, brackets, curly-braces etc. As the videos get more complex it would be helpful to have a refresher on these concepts because many times they are mentioned once in the "basics" steps of languages and then breezed over in later courses.

Thank you for again for your encouragement, that is always helpful when code gets overwhelming.

Steve Hunter
Steve Hunter
57,712 Points

I take your point, and agree. The basics of the syntax is tricky to pick up and not explained in this course. There may be others that cover the basics better. I took a while understanding what the opening erb tags meant, i.e. with and without the = sign!

I think much of the non-Ruby/Rails concepts; methods/functions, classes, objects/instances etc. are covered in other languages as they are common concepts. But that's no reason to omit them here!

Steve.