Recap of what I've learned so far

It's really awesome since I've started this program the different things we've learned and how they're building on another. With Procedural Ruby, we learned how methods work and how to access elements in arrays and hashes. With Object-Oriented Ruby, we learned about classes and instances and how classes and objects relate to one another. With SQL, we learned about databases and how to query from them. It can be a little overwhelming to learn all these new things and to keep remembering how they are used.

Next, we went over ORM, which is Object Relational Mapping. ORM is a way for our Ruby programs to manage database data by "mapping" database tables to classes and instances of classes to rows in those tables. It is essentially incorporating what we previously learned in Object-Oriented Ruby and merging in SQL and allows us to picture raw data relating with different classes.

After ORM, we learned about ActiveRecord. In ORM, we were building our own classes to get our objects to interact with our databases but this meant that there would be a lot of custom code for each project and each class that would do the same thing. Because developers are lazy, they created a gem called ActiveRecord, a Ruby gem that link our Ruby models with rows in a database table. Essentially, we can use ORM and call on the methods for it by typing one line.

All this to say is that I've been learning many new concepts and it's really exciting and fun to see it being applied to real world apps. As I move onto Sinatra and Rails, it will continue to build on one another. I'm excited to learn and keep going!