Curtis Miller
I've had a couple of friends ask me about learning Ruby on Rails recently. I thought I might put together a few of the resources that I used to learn. Hopefully it will help others.
Books
- Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
- Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, and Andreas Schwarz
- Rails Recipes by Chad Fowler
- Ruby for Rails by David A. Black
- Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson
Videos
- Railscasts by Ryan Bates
- Ruby on Rails Screencasts
- Peepcode
Subscriptions
If you don't already have one, then you need to signup for a RSS feed reader. I use Bloglines, but there are a ton of different ones out there. When you are looking for something online and run across a good, informative site subscribe to it immediately; you can always remove it later. I usually give them a week or two before I remove or keep them. View all my subscription on my links page.
Lastly, just start playing around. Some of the first things I did using Rails was to implement exactly what was shown in the 15 minute screencasts, then make small modifications to see what would happen. That led me to larger mods and soon I was writing my own. When I got the Agile book, I was stoked. I got about 150 pages into it and had this overwhelming feeling that I should learn more about Ruby first. I put down the Agile book and picked up the Ruby for Rails book. That gave me a much better understanding of Ruby and I highly recommend it. After that, the Agile book was a much better read.
Hope that can gets someone learning. Got more? Comment.
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