Category Archives: The Book

the-book

Chapter 6b – the layman’s introduction to database migrations in Ruby on Rails

By Grubb | Published: October 14, 2009

This is not for programmers. This is for myself, because when I first started poking at Rails 6 months ago, I didn't have any idea why I needed to edit a migration file, much less what a migration was, except that it must have something to do with a database. I only knew that because of the command

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Chapter 6a – Version Control

By Grubb | Published: October 14, 2009

So it's been a while, eh? Not too much in the mood to write about what I've learned when most of what I've learned is how much I have to learn, y'know? Anyway, I've been back into Ruby on Rails lately, since Ruby has got to be the dead simplest real programming language out there. Oh yeah, and I have a major project cooking on Rails, but I'll elaborate later. Let's talk about version control...

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Chapter 5 – Domains

By Grubb | Published: June 11, 2009
Bollocks!!  Do not buy a domain from Yahoo. I just want to make sure that shows up in the description of search results, if there are any.  Now a parable...
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Chapter 4 – The API

By Grubb | Published: April 28, 2009
Facebook made this announcement yesterday through the Developers section of their site:
Today we are excited to announce an important step toward greater openness through Facebook Platform.
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Chapter3 – devPlatform

By Grubb | Published: April 7, 2009
As in, what does that mean, anyway?  I'll try and keep it short. When I spoke of Ruby on Rails the other day as the 'hotsh!t dev platform of the day', I realized that it would need some clarification.  So let me clarify. Coding pretty much anything is a massive, time consuming job.  That's part of the reason that computer languages have evolved from 1s and 0s to Fortran to C to C++ to Java to Ruby: if you were to try and write the Twitter website in assembly language (binary), you'd be there coding for a very long time.  If you were to try and write Windows 7, you couldn't do it.
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Chapter2 – Databases

By Grubb | Published: April 5, 2009
This part of the blog is going to be tough to write.  Not because I don't have much to say on the topic, but because I have frequent pangs of "dude, you don't really know anything about any of this stuff".  Then the other side of my brain speaks up. "Dude, it's cool.  They know you're not a professor.  That's the point of this whole thing, right?  If someone wants hard facts and a professionally written tutorial on computer science, they'd probably go somewhere else.
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Chapter1b

By Grubb | Published: March 30, 2009
Step 2. Learn to program
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chapter1a

By Grubb | Published: March 30, 2009
Quick bio - The difference between
As in, the difference between your brain and your computers CPU. The difference between how you think and speak and interact, and how your computer does. The difference between languages, be they interpreted or compiled, object oriented or procedural. This first chapter will hopefully assist in the process of the first few days after the moment where it first occurs to you that you want to learn how to develop software, be they games or business or iPhone apps.
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preface

By Grubb | Published: March 30, 2009
It occurred to me last night during the show (where I do all of my best thinking) that of all of the thousands of websites that I've pored over in this quest, of all the books that I've perused, of all the tutorials that I've read and followed through, the one thing that was missing was the square one explanation of what the hell we're doing here in the first place. Everything I've read so far assumes some sort of foreknowledge or education to prepare oneself for the task of learning software development. I have no such education.
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