Happy New Year - Tips/Updates/Resolutions and more!
Most useful tip I can give you all year to begin the year:
The best way to improve your coding and development skills is to review others' code and resolve issues they may be faced with. The course discussions provide you with the best platform for this, take a look at the pending questions others have posed and try to help them out. Here are general steps for error resolution:
1. Review error message image if provided.
2. Review code, ask for github repository link if not already provided, look for similar issues resolved in stackoverflow or google the issue.
If you've seen and resolved such an issue already - then it's easy, if not - great opportunity to learn about the issue and see how you can resolve it.
Consider this: My own coding skills have improved dramatically after I started helping out in the forums so I can't stress this enough!
Development environment setup - IDE, browser, local, mac, windows, linux - what's this guy Mashrur talking about, has he lost it???
Developing with Ruby on Rails, or with any framework/language for that matter, will require that you have a development environment set up where you can write your code. In the past this would require installing the required software (ruby, rails, git etc) to your local workstation (laptop, desktop etc.). Now that is no longer the case, you can the options below:
1) Use a browser based IDE - Sign-up for either cloud9 or nitrous and you have access to a browser based Integrated Development Environment. You will access your development environment by logging in to your account at the provider (either cloud9 or nitrous) and you'll be able to do all your development there. They are already equipped with rails and any other software that you may need to develop using rails so no installations are necessary. If you do this you will NOT be required to do anything locally, ie you will NOT need to install rails in your local development environment - be it Mac, Linux, Windows - nothing - all coding is done online. Cloud9 is free and nitrous is free for first 30 days (but nitrous requires credit card info at signup)
OR (note: NOT and)
2) Develop locally - this means you have decided to skip the browser based IDE's (I'm not sure why you'd want to) and would like to use the filesystem in your laptop or desktop to do all development. This will require you to install all the software necessary in your laptop/desktop like Ruby, Rails, Git etc. I recommend attempting this ONLY if you have a mac or linux system, and I strongly advise not doing this for Ruby on Rails if you're using Windows. If you're using Windows - use the free browser based option at cloud9. Warning: Even if using mac or linux, you may run into installation errors which will require patience on your part to resolve, to start off this may be in short supply, so just use the browser based IDE's.
HTML/CSS - Great free resource to get started:
Great free resource I came across recently to learn/improve or simply practice HTML/CSS - http://learn.shayhowe.com/
Students have asked for additional resources beyond W3schools and this was a lot of fun, I went through the lessons and enjoyed it greatly - highly recommended
I am now an affiliate of udemy:
For more information go to www.mashrurhossain.com
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Happy New Year!
- Mashrur
