Going into this project i felt pretty nervous; I didn’t feel like my understanding of Rails was really setting in after having gone through all of the lesson modules, but I anticipated that, like with my other projects, my comprehension would be completed through executing the project (fortunately I was right).
The most difficult part of the projet was incorporating all of the complex joins properly and utilizing my nested data sets. I also felt that I wasn’t completely certain how to navigate the new method of calling on path helpers for Rails. I actually struggled with this pretty substantially though the first quarter or so of my project, but then once it clicked, all of my views and links and helpers kind of just poured out and I wrote about half of my project over the course of an hour or so. Writing the controllers came pretty naturally by this point because I’ve written so many over the course of my modules and, as seems to be a common practive in coding, I was able to copy and paste a lot of my own code into different controllers and then cut down or add to the logic to make it meet my needs. I know it’s not the best practice (and I’m told it’s a sign of someone who’s destined for back end development), but I wrote almost all of my controller actions out entirely before I started my views. Fortunately my intuition was pretty accurate and almost all of my logic was sound from the start.
The models caused me a little bit of grief especially because I had to create a join table for my genres and books so I could have a many have many relationship between the two. However, once I was able to navigate the first display of this join, I was able to write a second one pretty quickly afterward. I feel like the struggle with the associations in this project helped to better solidify my knowledge of how they work and how to write them.
Another fun aspect of ths project was learning a little more about layouts, partials, and styling. I enjoy a lof ot the more “front end” stuff like making a nice looking layout, understanding how to apply specific styles throughout different parts of the project, and overall just making it look nice. This is something I’m looking forward to with React as well.
In all, my initial apprehension has turned into pretty certain confidence in my navigation of Rails. I still have more I can learn and practice, and I plant to do so by building out this project further into a fully functional webside that I will publish through Heroku.