Came back from the bookstore with all these beauties:
- Beginning Ruby on Rails, Steven Holzner, PhD
- Ajax on Rails, (O'Reilly), Scott Raymond
- CSS Cookbook, (O'Reilly), Christopher Schmitt
- The Believer, Feb 07 (they're having trouble with their online subscription renewal, so I'm buying off the shelf for now
- Oxford American, Issue 55
- Craft 02
Previously I'd given up on my hobby-level programming to make room for all of the other hobbies (and because I kind of suck as it turns out), but something TomTalk said to me a couple of days ago has been rattling around in my head like a bb. He observed that more than anything he wants to draw but can't, and I want to make apps myself but can't. We're both completely useless at things we're extremely passionate about. Time to give it another try. Side interests and side projects are mounting, and I'm sick of having no prayer at building even the most rudimentary prototypes to show what I want. My goals are to get fluent enough that I can finish and debug some things (hate-a-base comes to mind, which I was involved in conceptually but didn't touch any code), start to use Ruby on Rails instead of static psd's to make simple simple prototypes, and build an online presence to house all of the stuff I've got going on. I haven't built a personal portfolio since I did the last one in Flash MX.
Wish me luck. I don't want this to end with a whimper, and that's a very real possibility based on my track record.
As I think I mentioned to you before, Dan Benjamin's method is a pretty foolproof way of setting up Ruby and some nice tools on your local system (warning to non-Mac visitors: this won't work for you).
thanks, will be looking at that. for dreamhost-hosted domains, there's also this. first project might just be to get the blogging platform typo installed on 43showers.com.
RoR is surprisingly easy to set up on Windows machines anyway, even if they in general are teh suck.
Sounds like you need to spend some time at my house. I think Scott owns the Ajax/Rails book and I have O'Reilly's XHTML + CSS which is a bible to me. In fact, we have a ton of O'Reilly books that you can borrow. I'm sure Scott would love to talk nerd talk with you!