A Recipe for Learning to Program

In January 2015 I started learning Ruby on Rails.
I was spending a few hours a day and a month later I did not understand anything.
I could follow along with the tutorials and the commands looked familiar, and technically I was building basic sites. But I was following instructions without understanding anything.
I basically hit rock bottom because I was spending many hours, but I could not even build a basic blog, which is considered the “Hello World” for Ruby on Rails.
Fortunately I received this article
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/24/dont-believe-anyone-who-tells-you-learning-to-code-is-easy/#.63xodi:LvTH
I followed the author’s process of doing a tutorial 3 times in a row, specifically this tutorial
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
Each time I did the tutorial, I wrote many comments and explanations about every step, I made sure to understand and take notes on what I was doing and why I was doing it.
The first time I did this tutorial I understood a little bit.
A few minutes after finishing the tutorial the first time, I starting building the blog a second time. This time I understood a little bit more about the what and the whys of what I was doing.
The day after finishing the tutorial for the second time, I started the tutorial for the third time and final time.
This time I was able to build the blog with little help from the tutorial. Furthermore, I was able to understand how the Ruby on Rails framework helped guide with the next step, i.e. by reading the error messages I knew which controller action to create.
After completing the tutorial for the third time, I was finally able to grasp the basics of Ruby on Rails, I finally felt that my learning was on the right track.

Advertisement