Learning Web App Development

Preface

In early 2008, after about six years of grad school and teaching part-time, I found myself hoping to land a job as a full-time computer science professor. It didn’t take me long to realize that professor jobs are really hard to come by, and obtaining a good one has almost as much to do with luck as it has to do with anything else. So I did what any self-respecting academic does when faced with a scary academic job market: I decided to make myself employable by learning how to develop web applications.

This may sound a little strange. After all, I had been studying computer science for about nine years at that point, and had been teaching students how to develop software for about six years. Shouldn’t I have already known how to build web applications? It turns out that there’s a pretty large gap between practical, everyday software engineering and programming as taught by computer science departments at colleges and universities. In fact, my knowledge of web development was limited to HTML and a little CSS that I had taught myself at the time.

Fortunately, I had several friends who were actively working in the web development world, and most of them seemed to be talking about a (relatively) new framework called Ruby on Rails. It seemed like a good place to focus my efforts. So I purchased several books on the topic and started reading online tutorials to get up to speed.

And after a couple months of really trying to get it, I nearly gave up.

Why? Because most of the books and ...