rails best practices notes

rails_best_practices_notes.md

Rails Best Practices from CodeSchool

I took the course Rails Best Practices from CodeSchool and wanted to share my impressions.

Overall

• The tutorial assumes basic Rails knowledge
• Lessons are videos with examples
• Exercises are completed on Code School's site in a faux editor; the site keeps track of your
  progress and you are given points for each exercise you complete
• The exercises should have been harder
• There were some things they covered that I found to not be super-useful
• TL;DR: could have been harder, but I learned stuff and enjoyed the way it was taught

Things I liked

• a lot of info about block helpers in views
• handling with empty strings or empty enumerables in views
• yield and content_for
• skip_before_filter
• counter caches are handled in some detail, they really give a sense of the pluses and minuses of counter
• passing batch sizes to _find_each()):
  Model.find_each(batch_size: 200)

Things that were just ok

• nested attributes: I've worked with them and I sort of hate them
• The videos are intro'd and outro'd with mashups of old video game graphics. At first the trope was funny, then it got old.

If people are interested I can drop the slides from the course into the Dropbox.

-- mr (robot)