|
|
|
|
|
|
by yangez
4505 days ago
|
|
|
> Rails isn’t just a brick wall, it’s a brick mountain... By the end of the first month, I had literally no idea what was going on. This is not a brick wall. It's giving up as soon as something gets hard. Rails is a great example. It has so much behind-the-scenes "magic" that it's really hard to wrap your mind around at first. Back when I was first learning it, my brain felt like it had been filled with cement at the end of every day. I didn't understand it for weeks; I felt like I was just pounding my head on a brick wall over and over. Then, all of a sudden, the fog suddenly parted and it was like being set free. After that, I never had another Rails problem that I couldn't handle. Everyone that I've ever talked to that has learned Rails - or any other language - has struggled through this initial pain period. The difference is that the successful ones push through it after it stops being fun. It doesn't only apply to programming either. Everything you ever learn starts with a "brick wall" that you think you'll never get past. Once you suck it up and break through it, you may find that the road is clear from there. |
|
|
I think I'm a decent programmer but the scope and complexity of Rails (especially with all the great concepts and practices Hartl introduces simultaneously) is daunting at first. But you just have to keep at it and it eventually clicks. I think I did his tutorial 3 times from scratch before I really started to understand what was going on, and it wasn't until I tried to make a large and complex app that all the features and beautiful organization of Rails began to feel natural. Rails (or Ruby, or any other insanely powerful tool) just takes a long time to really grok, and even longer to master. Smart people are used to getting things quicker than that and that is what makes all of these things so emotionally painful. Our projects don't work and our egos suffer as well.