Every 4-5 months I receive an email from someone who has come across an old forum post called HOWTO: Beginning Relationships that I wrote in 2006.

It’s fun to go back and look at that early code. It was aimed at being an absolute beginners guide to starting a Ruby on Rails project. The images are no longer available and I would be hard-pressed to find them in my digital archives, but the content is intact.

Most of the time the questions are the result of differences between Rails 3 and what I am guessing to be Rails 1.x. When I wrote that tutorial the through: option had just been added! However, What always surprises me is there seems to be a decent number of people who are not grasping the most basic concepts, despite the availability of great books¹

I’ve been considering re-writing this tutorial to reflect the changes in Rails 3.2.x but tend to stop when I look at the landscape of great beginner resources, the least of which are the well written Ruby on Rails Guides². It seems, though, that maybe some dead simple beginning tutorials might be helpful for people looking for the concepts rather than the full techniques. This is what Code School³ is great at, but for quick reference it is difficult to hunt through their slides and not everyone will pay for access.

I am regularly training brand new developers, typically students with little to no previous experience in any web development. I plan take with some of our initial conversations related to setup, design, and implementation and turn them into short tutorials. I think I’ll start with a refresh of that 6 and a half year old(!) tutorial on basic relationships.