It seems like ages since I last posted! I’ve still been making progress though- this week I’ve finished the Stanford SQL course, read through the Frameworks chapter of the Odin Project, and now I’m looking at diving into Ruby on Rails.

The Odin Project warned us that the SQL course would be pretty heavy going- which it was! I was relieved to read that we’d be going back to it later on in the Odin Project, so it was okay if I couldn’t quite wrap my head around everything just yet. Phew! I was glad to see the back of that chapter!

The frameworks section of the Odin Project was a really good read for me. Previously, the only framework that I could think of was Bootstrap, a CSS framework [which I found really useful when I used it in a codecademy course.] The frameworks in this chapter, including Rails, Django, and .NET [those were the ones I’d heard of previously, but didn’t know them as such], are frameworks for programming languages. Doing a bit of further reading I came across a list of frameworks which included jQuery [it’s actually a library, but bear with me…] and frameworks suddenly made a lot more sense to me! Using jQuery meant that I didn’t need to write the code for a lot of things, it simply happened behind the scenes for me, by writing a lot less [and a lot more readable] code. Frameworks do exactly that!

I’ve started the Ruby on Rails section, and am still reading through one of the Introduction to Ruby on Rails articles. I’m feeling a lot more optimistic about Ruby on Rails now than I have been previously. There’s a huge [very welcoming] community of developers using Ruby on Rails- it seems to be the most popular in the CodeNewbie community which I’m a part of [though I haven’t been as active as I would like lately!], so I’ll be hitting the forum up for help when I get stuck!