brad garland

In my work, I am project manager for a web-based app and I’ve been working with outsourced developers for a while now and continually keep running into communication issues ranging from ‘me not being able to adequately describe what i want’ to ‘developers entirely missing what we’re wanting to do’. Which, inevitably, leaves me wanting to just do it myself.

So about a month and a half ago I decided to start down that path of coding by learning Rails. As I started reading the ‘Agile Web Development for Rails’ book I came to realize that understanding the [tag]Ruby language[/tag] first would probably be a good way to go in conjunction with learning Rails so, I also picked up the ‘Programming Ruby’ book, both books from The Pragmatic Programmers. Despite not having coded since college, I’m following along pretty well.
So….I’ve been going back and forth with those but noticed while learning Rails that a big part that the authors glaze over is the views section with all the [tag]CSS[/tag] and [tag]XHTML[/tag] stuff so I also went and picked up a book on XHTML, HTML, and CSS. I’m just good enough to be dangerous with HTML and CSS but wanted to be able to make any application I build look decent so I figured I needed to jump into that as well.

Then, today, (still keeping up?) I was shopping at Barnes and Noble with my wife and decided to grab [tag]Dan Cederholm[/tag]’s book Bulletproof Web Design to help me out with understanding some basic web concepts and [tag]Steve Krug[/tag]’s ‘Don’t Make me Think’ that dicusses web usability.

Phew, so there you have it, all that cash blown on books. So what now? Well, been bouncing around really not knowing where to start. I think I’m going to focus on Ruby until that fries me out and then do some CSS. Any suggestions would be so helpful.