I gotta understand this, and I don't yet (fuzzy)

This is called a symbol in Ruby. Why do we use them this way in Rails? There's probably an answer somewhere, but in general, like most things in Rails - that's the convention.

Thanks for your quick response, Maciej -- I have to re-read some documentation on symbols.

I remember it from working with hashes, but that was just writing Ruby code.

In rails, things jump back and forth between files so often that my head is spinning trying to keep up with the cause-effect relationships. So much happens "behind the scenes." I wish the treehouse staff would spend one whole session simply explaining the file relationships that are created when you type "rails generate [scaffold, model, controller, etc]," and how those files relate to one another. It would make things easier to follow. Do you know if there's a resource where the rails file/directory structure is explained, say, in a block diagram?

I started that rails tutorial a couple weeks ago and dropped it because mid-tutorial it shifted from Ruby 1.9.3 (and rails 3.something) to Ruby 2.0 and rails 4 --I wasn't even able to go back and revisit previous text because it had all been changed. Also got bogged down in Bitbucket and Heroku errors, encryption key errors, etc (delays that prevented me from learning very much about rails). I'm on a PC so rvm isn't an option without some workarounds. Finally just dumped it all and installed Ruby 2.0 and Rails 4. I'll revisit the rails tutorial later. Thanks for that suggestion, though.

Do you know the name of the book from Pragmatic Bookshelf? They have a video tutorial that looks like it would be just what I'm after, but I don't have the $180 to take it right now. Couldn't find many rails-specific books, but maybe I just don't know what title I'm looking for.

Thanks again for your help.

Thanks once again for your help.

I have Ubuntu on my desktop machine but tried installing inside windows--that's resulted in a lot of system errors (in Ubuntu) that I don't know how to fix yet, and that's after going through a bunch of workarounds just to get it to install in the first place.

On the new (used) laptop I just bought, I installed Ubuntu in a new partition (which cut into my HD space quite a bit) and it installed without any errors. I tried the VM approach on the desktop machine (using Ubuntu on a USB stick) but it responds very slowly. I'd like to get the installation on my desktop working properly without re-partitioning the C drive, but it could take a while, and some research--some communication with users/experts online. I may end up going for the partitioned approach [sigh], and hope it doesn't mess with the Windows installation. Didn't seem to cause any problem with Windows on the laptop (though it does, now, boot to Ubuntu by default).

Thanks for responding, thanks for the book title, thanks for your patience with a newbie, and have a great day!