Week two is officially in the books, and so far I am feeling pretty good. We started off the week making sure everyone had a good understanding of arrays and hashes. We also learned how to create a new Class and call methods inside those classes. I felt confident that I knew exactly everything that was going on four hours into class on Tuesday. Then the final hour of class came around, and I felt my head was going to explode.
Our TA, Raghu, gave us a challenge of calculating the same shopping cart exercise we were assigned as homework last week, only this time were were to convert it into a program that used classes and methods to make the calculations / print the total. Usually we pair program, but on this day I was flying solo. It felt like the entire class was marching forward, while I just sat there trying to think through where to even begin. I started laying out my thoughts, and deleted them. I then started again, and once again felt like I was heading down a dead end road. After about 10 minutes, I asked for a little help on how to get started. Come to find out, I was originally headed down the correct path. Raghu reviewed the solution with the class very quickly. I had no time to copy the solution down, but I felt like I understood the general thought process and how he came up with his solution.
After class, I tried to work on the same problem from scratch. I was totally stumped, and could not get the program to return the shopping cart total value correctly. I must have sat there for about an hour and half trying to figure it out before I decided to take a break and head home. That night I took another stab at it. I sat there for a couple more hours puzzled why my solution was not working correctly. My code looked like:
def totaltotal = 0@cart_array.each do |i|total += i[:item].cost * i[:quantity]endend
Everything seemed to be correct. I was pulling out the item, applying the cost to that item, pulling out the quantity from my array. I then multiply them, and add that calculation to my running total. I wasn't getting any errors, but I also was not getting the total cost for my shopping cart. What could be wrong? What I realized after staring at my screen for 3+ hours is that my method was not returning anything, because I had not told it to return anything. Just because I was running the calculation did not mean that the method automatically is going to return that info. Once I added the "return total" to my method, everything worked.
def totaltotal = 0@cart_array.each do |i|total += i[:item].cost * i[:quantity]endreturn totalend
We also learned how to output data automatically into a html and css file. It finally seemed like we were doing something real. Something that I could easily apply to the app I want to build. I spent that night and next day building a program that would add book titles, author, and reading level into a library. The program then would output a summary of all books in that library. This exercise helped me make sure that I truly understood methods, and how they return information when called.
Thursday was exciting because we jumped into Rails for the first time. We built a basic web app that had an index page with an ordered list of landmarks. When clicking on the landmark, you would go to a details page that was dynamically put together by the ruby code embedded in the *.html file. Once again, I went home and built a version of this same app that related to listing books in a library. It had dynamic detail pages for each book that would list important information about the book that was clicked. I really feel like all of this is coming together.
On Friday, I went to Eight Bit Studios to meet with my mentor Don Bora. We went over the library app I had made the night before, and he introduced me to the "before_filter." Basically this can be added in your controller file. You can add a method that will then be used in all of your pages without repeating the code each time. Don and I spent some time discussing my app, and where I should begin. Basically I mapped out everything I want to build in the next 10 weeks. I broke this up into the main sections such as user accounts, library, and backpack. Under each of those sections I have a list of the the functions and sub-functions that will need to be built. I am going to try and bite off a piece each week with what I learn in class. I am really excited to get going on this.
