From absoulutely zero Ruby or Rails knowledge 4 days ago, I have now played around with the framework and made a very simple app, and pushed it to heroku. It’s available here.
It is absolutely nothing special, but I mostly built the app for myself. Whenever I’m reading books, I usually encounter some vocabulary that I do not know, and thought it would be neat if I could put all this vocab online, and check back from time to time and make sure that I know it.
My very small feature set is
- Login with twitter (only this for now)
- Add a word, and fetch it’s definition, or provide your own
- Review the words on your list, and say whether you know it or don’t. The stats for this are kept.
I’m pleasantly surprised just how easy it is to make Rails apps, and just how structured everything is. I don’t even have to worry about structuring my code across files, since Rails enforces me to keep to a convention.
Overall, from knowing nothing about Ruby or Rails, I managed to build this in probably around 15 hours! This was with the help of Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails. Thanks pragprog for awesome books which get me up to speed really quickly!
Let me know whether you like the app, or would consider using it. Right now it’s just on a free heroku package, so only 5MB of database space!
Looking forward to making some more stuff now with rails!