Final Blog — Flatiron School

For the final blog during my Flatiron journey, I want to summarize my experience and go over some of the most interesting topics that I’ve been learning for the past year.

The languages this experience has exposed me to are:

Ruby

SQLite3

HTML5

CSS

JavaScript

Ruby was the first language to learn in this program and was my first in general since I’ve never learned programming before my journey at Flatiron. I really enjoyed Ruby since the syntax was easy to learn and everything made sense. Starting in Ruby was very beneficial and important to build the much-needed confidence to get through the program.

JavaScript was much more difficult at first, but with more practice it became easier. Knowing how important JavaScript in modern programming is, it was very important to deeply understand JavaScript.

As for Frameworks, we learned the following:

Sinatra

Ruby on Rails

React

Frameworks made creating a fully functioning application much easier. Programming frameworks provide standard way to build and deploy applications. Sinatra is a library written in Ruby. It allows users to create Ruby applications with minimal effort.

Ruby on Rails was much more comprehensive and heavy weight comparing to Sinatra. It’s an MVC (model-view-controller) framework. ActiveRecord macros are used heavily in Rails which makes it easy to use.

Finally, React … By far it was the best framework and the one I enjoyed the most. React is very user friendly and the way it consists of multiple components that interacts with each other makes it very interesting to use. Each component has its own state. React allows the user to send information from parent components to child components through props. Using call back functions, we can trigger changes in parent components from child components. We also learned how to use Redux which is a state management tool that allows the user to store the state of all components in one place (store). Each component can access the state in the store using the connect function.

In summary. It was a great experience, full of knowledge and challenges.