5 chapters down, filling in the layout, free online book, deployment and branching!

So as you can probably tell from the title I have done  a lot since my last post.

First, I am already 5 chapters down.  So far way ahead of schedule, which is great, because some of it was definitely pretty optimistic later on anyways.

Chapter 4 was a lot of ruby, and going through a lot of what it can do.  Chapter 5 was mostly layout, but it had a lot of new and important stuff such as url routing and creating a new controller for our user. I also went back to try and better understand some other concepts.  I looked more deeply into the automated testing built into rails, which is really great for finding issues on the spot, however I am not sure I fully understand this enough to know when I should create a test on my own.  Hopefully I'll have a better understanding by the end.

Also every chapter has us create a branch in our version control when we start.  This is something I have never done before, even though I have used many version control software programs before, none of my jobs had required this.  However after learning about it, there were definitely times when this would have been VERY useful, and also it makes a lot of sense.  Its something I always knew about, but since I never did it I always was like "meh i guess its not necessary".  Instead of explaining it myself, I found this really awesome article on branching.   Sahweeet.

I also was getting sick of my big thick book constantly closing on me, and me losing my space, and not being able to copy and paste from book to my code, and googled around a bit... and low and behold, the entire book is free online!  So if anyone wants to learn some Ruby on rails, and some of these other cool tools (linux, github, heroku, ruby, gedit) along with me, check it out!  Everything is free!! Wish i knew that before I bought the book, but whatever, at least i can take it on trains and stuff with me.

Last but not least, I went back and looked further into heroku, and its a free hosting service for small ruby apps.  This was in the book, but I sort of skipped over it at first because it required setup and such.  Then I rememberd I am doing this to learn as much as possible so I shouldn't skip anything.  Heroku is pretty great, and its allowing me to deploy my sample site live already, and get used to deploying the app from git to production, which is really cool.  So if you want to check out my progress on my app  check out this link http://severe-robot-761.heroku.com/  obviously there isn't much too it since I'm only on chapter 5, but still pretty cool.  Also severe-robot-761 is an auto-naming thing.  I can actually rename it whatever I want so long as it isnt taken, but for now I really don't care.  Also if I really grow to like this I might just buy some space at heroku and launch my main site from there when all is said and done. 

And since everyone loves picture heres a before and after so far of the main page of my app, just to show progress from last time.