Thoughts on First Delivery of Class

This class is correctly targeted at more experienced folks. However, I didn't/wasn't prepared for how advanced they need to be.

Installing Ruby on Windows turned out to be pretty smooth given Katy's help and knowledge of Windows use. I thought that was going to be the most difficult part.

It turns out, Mac's are not equipped for good command-line usage out of the box for users with little understanding of how to set up initialization files.

The issue of needing to add the user directory where the gem --user-install commands will place the sass gem took the most time. Add to that the fact this was done "on the fly" as I had not even considered this might be necessary, and I forgot one simple step, and what should have been the first 30 or so minutes of the class ended up taking 2 hours.

This class, and probably all the others I'm considering, MUST follow a thorough command line introduction and familiarisation.

There are also students who will probably never be comfortable working in the command line, and never spend the time to become comfortable. We shouldn't be teaching this course to them.

The tool CodeKit that exists for OS/X would make this go away by giving them a more comfortable GUI face, and great automaticity. I don't know of a similar thing on Windows, but perhaps if someone can explore the Visual Studio environment, or spend time researching it, we could put together a more helpful course for the students without forcing command line familiarity, and reach them where they are.