Saturday
Nov202010
Diving into Ruby on Rails
Saturday, November 20, 2010 at 9:30PM One of my missions in the coming year is to learn and get to know Ruby on Rails, and working with Ubuntu Linux. Here are the resources I’m currently using to get to learn Ruby on Rails:
- Listen to The Ruby Show podcast – to listen to what rubyists talk about (hint – lots of tools and extensions you’ve never heard about)
- Go to TryRuby.org for a 15 min. interactive Ruby tutorial in your browser
- Go to RailsForZombies.org for an interactive and fun Ruby on Rails Tutorial and labs, inside your browser.
- Get the book Rails 3 in Action from Manning. It’s a well written and nicely composed book, that starts from the basic - doing spec and test first rails applications.
in RoR
RoR 
Reader Comments (4)
I've read just about all the Ruby/Rails books/websites. Best ruby book was the pragprog Metaprogrammong Ruby book. Best screencast is Dave Thomas' Ruby Object Model screencasts from PragProg. Best deep dive on Rails <3.0 is The Rails Way book. Best >3.0+ info is anything from @jm or the Rails Guide documentation. Rails4Zombies looks fun too.
Just my $0.02
You're going to enjoy learning Ruby.
For developers coming from the MS stack - 'The Well-Grounded Rubyist' (also a Manning publication) is an excellent book. It's up-to-date (ruby 1.9) and the author - David Black does a great job of introducing Ruby - the basics, the environment, and the important language features. I use an Ubuntu virtual machine as my 'learning environment' - as well as Vim to write code (watch the Peepcode tutorials, or Vimcasts for Vim and kick-start your DotFiles from here http://github.com/58bits/dotfiles). The online Lowfat Linux tutorial is very good as well. Using the Ruby Version Manager (RVM) is a great way to create multiple Ruby version environments and Gemsets - especially with a lot of change happening at the moment between Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 and Rails 2 to 3. RVM is very cool. I also bought the Rails 3 in Action MEAP edition from Manning and that's next on my list to read..
If someone is completely new to Ruby I'd probably recommend Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper over The Well-Grounded Rubyist. Beginning Ruby introduces both the language and tools (RubyGems, Rails etc.) with exercises, whereas The Well-Grounded Rubyist is a very thorough survey of the language itself, but does not cover libraries or tools.
I really suggest railscasts.com created by Ryan Bates. He produces really nice webcasts where I learned a lot.