ldopa.net

Next time you have about 45 minutes of free time, I really suggest you run through this cool Ruby on Rails “cookbook” example here, because there is, at one point, somewhere midway on page three, something that happens that is kind of akin to magic, and I don’t want to even spoil it for you by telling you what it is. And maybe it’s not so magic, but it seems magical to me. I’ve always considered myself “utterly database retarded”; database design was the one class in college that I flunked*, so that I can put together a little MySQL front end like this is pretty damn exciting to me. It’s like finding out you can swim (and without the gay little waterwings!) after years of being utterly terrified of the town pool.

NOTES: The tutorial is slightly Windows-centric, so Mac users probably want to do all this stuff before the tutorial, and to make the database, you can either gain a cursory understanding of mysql at the command line, or do what I did and download the excellent “YourSQL” and do this to create the database for the tutorial example:

1. Launch “YourSQL”. Add connection (i.e. “localhost”, “root”, and the password, if that’s how you roll) for your local copy of MySQL.
2. Click “Create Database” (and name it “cookbook”).
3. Click “Create Table” (and name it “recipes”).
4. Click on the newly created “recipes”, select the first (and only) record, rename it to id, change the type to int, set the size to 11, and check off “Auto Increment”; this will cause YourSQL to prompt you to ask if you want this field to be your “primary key”, and you will say “Yes”.
5. Set up the rest of the tables so they look like this.

…then proceed with the rest of the walkthrough.

~jeff

*(and flunked *hard*, embarassingly and publically. Sometime when you’re feeling low and you need a cheap pick-me-up and I’m feeling relatively decent about myself, ask me about it and I’ll tell you the story. It’s a story of: not-at-all reading the textbook, staying up way too late, coding an stunningly poor little web page to fake the assignment, and then being deeply, publicly — and justifiably — humiliated the next morning by the teacher in front of an entire auditorium full of people as Netscape 4.0 crashed over and over).