journal-16-2-11
I've decided to restructure the tutorial a bit to focus more on web development frameworks for this first half of the semester. I'm thinking for a project I will build some minimal web application in two or three major frameworks (at this point I'm thinking Rails, Django, and Zend) and write a write-up comparing them. I have been feeling that the course is a bit unstructured up to now and this should help give some clear goals. Then in the second half, I'll try diving into the network materials I originally planned to use and do some final project possibly relating to security.
So far I've made significant progress learning Rails by working through
this tutorial which builds a simple twitter like application. I'm finding it quite interesting. So far I'm feeling like the framework is powerful in that it allows me to set things up relatively quickly. Unfortunately I feel like I don't have a full sense of what's going on. The tutorial will suggest in places that I don't really need to understand whats happening under the hood an often I think I understand more than they expect me to (the tutorial assumes no development experience) but I still feel like there's a lot of letting rails do things for me that would be great if I really understood what rails was doing but currently feels like cheating. Routing is one issue in particular where I feel like I'm just following a recipe that works but I'm not sure whats really happening.
I'm wondering if this feeling of being disconnected from the inner workings of the application will come up in other frameworks or if it's just Rails, or even, just this tutorial.
