I worked my way through Task E: Checkout in the Agile Development Book today. I find myself increasingly confused by what is going on behind the scenes as my depot project gets more complicated. So far, everything is still working, but I do not understand the logic behind all of the changes I am making to the application.
Since I got a Mac Mini over the holiday break, I decided that I might as well start over using the new computer to learn Ruby. Of course, this meant installing the Ruby development environment on a Mac after finally getting it to work on my PC.
In my third day of Ruby, I finally learned how to add CSS to documents. I continue to be amazed by just how darned easy Ruby is. My only problem came when trying to fill out the syntax for formatting numbers.
I finally realized that to change the format of numbers, the following works:
<?php
= number_to_currency(product.price, {:unit => "£", :separator => ","})
?>
Ruby is amazing for handling databases. I couldn't believe how easy it was to create an admin interface for my test demo application. The only problem I ran into today was adding a column to the database. I couldn't get the database table to updated after adding a price column. I finally realized that it was my fault for not reading page 2 of the book more carefully. Since Agile Web Development is written for Rails 1.2, I needed to install the Rails framework snapshot for the time being. I figured this out via the helpful errata page for the book.
I am starting to work my way through the new Agile Development book. My first problem seems to be that I get:
Application error (Rails)
Submitted by Julia on Tue, 11/30/1999 - 09:00
I went through the A3 and A4 without many problems. My only early problem was that I was on a plane and couldn't download the css and images needed for Iteration A4. When it came time for Playtime, I got a little stuck on the second question, "Change the error message associated with one of your validations." I was trying to change the error messages for multiple fields with one :message. I finally figured out that I needed to define unique messages for each field like this.
Now I'm testing blogging from TextMate.
