Where to start?

[jessepollak]

So, I just found out about this group and am really interested in participating, but I feel a little lost just trying to tackle Active Support—and you guys call it a warmup!

Any tips on a good place to start within Active Support? There are so many folder in activesupport/lib/active_support, it's a little overwhelming.

Any help would be much appreciated!

[jessepollak]

In other news, I was looking through the active_support/core_ext/array/access.rb file and found the following

 # Equal to <tt>self[41]</tt>. Also known as accessing "the reddit".
 def forty_two
   self[41]
 end

Since I found this group through Reddit, I have to ask if anyone know what this is?

https://github.com/codereading/rails/blob/master/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/array/access.rb

[jessepollak]

Also, what do the "< tt > < tt>" around code bits mean?

EDIT: Maybe it's just for formatting because Markdown seems to accept it as some sort of formatting.

[adamakhtar]

Hi jpollak92

dont worry if its difficult, Im in the same boat as you.

The purpose of this warmup was really just to get started and see what kind of problems a code study group will face. One problem you have highlighted is how to make the entry point as easy as possible for the various projects we will cover.

Perhaps it would be good as a group to create a kind of simple overview or run through of the code i.e. explaining for a typical scenario how the code works from entry point to finish. At the end of this dry run this will be one of the questions I'll ask the group.

I havent looked through a lot of active support yet but i think it mostly isolated code for helper methods. So I guess you could just start anywhere and find a method you use a lot say in your views and see how the magic is done.

[adamakhtar]

As per your third point I'm sure that is just markdown for documentation (rdoc etc)
I dont do this myself so maybe someone else can give a better answer but for purposes of documentation, you can write comments above your methods using certain syntax and using gems like rdoc you can create a hyperlinked documentation like http://rspec.rubyforge.org/rspec/1.2.6/

EDIT
ahh just saw you mention markdown in your edit.

[jessepollak]

I like the idea of a simple overview or run through of some big chunk of code. Maybe a bunch of us could do a live chat or something...that would be really helpful I think.

[adamakhtar]

ok I'll bring this up as a kind of objective for our first proper code reading session. Judging by comments in the google group it looks like it will be rack or sinatra.

[cj3kim]

Looks like a challenge! Off to reading!

[gazay]

About forty_two method in array/access.rb - in old times (about 3 years ago) in Rails dhh added methods like second, thirdand etc till tenth. And was started big discussion with trolling about - why not till 100 - rails@22af62c
After this discussion dhh reduced number of this methods to only first five and added method forty_two as a joke)
http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/e50530ca3ab5db53ebc74314c54b62b91b932389

[adamakhtar]

ahh i remember hearing that story. Totally forgot about it.

[orlando]

@gazay didnt know about that story.. really funny.. thanks. it made my day :)