Around 125 women and exactly two men applied for the second Rails Girls event in Tallinn. Wow! That’s awesome, but at the same time awfully sad, because we weren’t able to accept so many people.
But the good news is that Rails Girls doesn’t keep its methods in secret and you can all do basically everything the others did at the workshop! You won’t be able to ask coaches like you could’ve done at the workshop, but you have access to the almighty internet that probably knows the answer to any question you might face when installing Rails or creating your first app.
Long story short: you have to have a browser, a text editor (Rails Girls Tallinn suggested this time using Sublime Text - it’s better than Notepad and less complicated than Komodo Edit) and Ruby on Rails installed on your computer (this is what the terminal, i.e. the black box is for). No biggie, right?
Installing Rails can be a bit of a hassle, but you can always drop by the Rails Girls Estonia group or Tech Sisters’ page on Facebook (by the way, questions in Estonian are also welcomed, but we might have difficulties with Latvian, though :P) and ask or just google your problem. Googling can sound like a very obvious thing to do, but seriously, it’s just worth repeating, because if you want to learn to program, you’ll be doing a lot of googling in the future.
When you’ve managed to install these three things, congratulations! You can now move on to actually creating your first app! Follow the instructions here. If you’re done, you can even put your app online with Heroku. And again, when in trouble: google or just ask.
Other stuff you might want to try when taking your first steps in the world of programming.
If you prefer tutorials to have kitties, zombies, unicorns and other informal cute supplements, drop by these sites:
- Try Ruby - try Ruby in the browser, taking one small step at a time
- why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby - This is nuts, but has foxes in it! Even if you won’t make it past the 10th page, you’ll get a glimpse into the whacky mind of famous Ruby programmer why the lucky stiff (Jonathan Gillette).
- Rails for Zombies - watch five videos and then do some exercises in your browser.
If you just want to get cracking and have more time on hand, try the following sites.
- Ruby on Rails tutorial by Michael Hartl
- Learn Ruby the Hard Way (a “translation” of “Learn Python the Hard Way” by Zed Shaw)
- If you’d like to create your own blog in Rails, you’ll find loads of tutorials guiding you through this process (just google!).
Other sites worth visiting (but not about Ruby or Ruby on Rails).
- w3schools - good for those who know nothing about HTML and CSS
- Codecademy - interactive and fun way to learn coding.
Good luck (and patience!)!
Esta