I have 'inherited' a fairly large Ruby on Rails repository that was developed for a web application and am trying to make heads or tails of it. I am specifically looking at this from the perspective of trying to analyze and understand the code under the assumptions of: 1) I'm not really a coder per se, but can follow VERY limited aspects of html/erb/haml, css/sass, js/coffeescript/angularjs, ruby, sql upon which I believe the app is based. 2) I have/had access to the user interface and was able to work with the application for some time, so understand its intent.
So, my questions is/are really more a procedural inquiry. I suspect many people who are trying to learn ROR would benefit from this type of understanding, (sort of a top-down approach to gain perspective).
How would one best try to absorb a given ROR application? What would you consider to be the first things at which to look and absorb, followed by secondary and so on... And more specifically, hows does one determine which code is associated with which gem? (this particular app has 150-200 gems in the gemfile).
