Hi all,
i have just finished reading Beginning Rails 3 and have done as many tutorials on the web I can find.
So I have decided for my first real project I would like to create a system where an admin can created courses controlled from some sort of back-end.
Users could then register an account book and pay for course utilizing maybe some sort of calender system.
Am I starting out too big for my first project? Any advice on how I should tackle it would be great.
Thanks.
To my way of thinking you could start defining the database (maybe with the aid of something like uml) and the rest should be straightforward from that. Another approach would be to define what you want each part of the user interface to look and work like and then create the system to work with that. I am an advocate of thinking about the system before implementing it.
YMMV Norm
So, I'm going to get my plug in here for "Behaviour Driven Development".
Start with the sorts of things you want your application users to be doing. You have a brief start there: register, book, pay, etc, but there's obviously much more.
When you have a reasonable set of stories, aka scenarioes, you can start to write up your features a la cucumber/gherkin and use them to drive your development, following the red/green/refactor concept in BDD/TDD.
BigDesignUpFront followed by DoTheSimplestThingYouCanThinkOf is typically the way to go. In addition, building the application from the core stories out works best, keeping in mind that you always want to have a working application, even if it's just very minimal set of features. (Pragmatic Programmer calls this "Firing Tracer Bullets").
Cool, thanks for the replies. I nutted out a database schema last night. Now to get down into it.