A few months ago Sam urged me to sign me up for a class on Ruby on Rails that promised to help newbies like myself learn to program web apps. It’s a class offered through webschoolcincy.com, and I have to admit that while I was excited, I was also a bit hesitant. First of all, the course follows the curriculum of Stanford’s Computer Science 142 course, which requires a new book practically every week and forces us to sit through a series of, well, to be completely honest, very dry lectures. (Apologies to the professor.) Second of all, I learned in the first class that out of 25 students, only one other guy and I were the true newbies. Everyone else had a background in programming and was trying to pick up a new language. There was no way I could compete…. Or so I thought.  Continue reading →