Learning web development - my rails journey

Original post from May 2015

Even though I have not been a typical software developer in my career, I have used my coding skills (google, copy, paste) to create PoCs at work. Recently it has just been limited to pulling in a WSDL in java to test how the SOAP API works. I tried my hand at Android development a few years back. But the one place that I never really dabbled in was the web. I did help to maintain a few JSP pages a few years ago, but I barely knew what I was doing. And with the rise of responsive websites, I have always regretted not knowing anything about HTML, CSS, javascript and web frameworks.

In my pursuit of relevance, I recently took a MooC course about Web Application Architectures: https://class.coursera.org/webapplications-003/quiz

It explains MVC, HTTP and a bunch of related concepts, using Ruby on Rails as the tool. I dont regret learning rails, and I have since started expanding my learning with these resources:

• https://www.railstutorial.org/book/beginning
• https://medium.com/@mackenziechild/how-i-finally-learned-rails-95e9b832675b
  I highly recommend railstutorial - it is extremely well written, and takes you through the concepts while developing a few apps.

Not related to Rails, but it contains a nice story on how frameworks win over flat coding: http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/from_flat_php_to_symfony2.html

Whats next? According to http://www.quora.com/What-should-a-fullstack-developer-know-in-2015, I need to know these:

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript