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Want to Learn Rails?

Well I have been hearing a lot from people in facebook, google groups and online forum wanting to learn Rails. There question is simple “I want to learn Rails”, “How do I learn Ruby on Rails?”, “How do i become a Ruby on Rails programmer?”. Well the funny feeling I get while reading these questions is that, its the exact questions I posted in Google Groups, forums, etc when I wanted to start learning Rails and Ruby couple of years ago. So I though of giving back to the community and to my company blog, by posting on how to learn rails, and answer a few questions every newbie always have.

 

Q) How to learn Ruby on Rails?

Well to get started I would suggest this Rails Tutorial. Excellent tutorial, with details explanation. Build for people with little or no knowledge in Ruby. Further more it also teaches and introduces a newbie to Git and TDD.

If you don’t like reading from the web, and prefer books then I suggest Agile Web Development With Rails by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson. The advantage of using rails is the ability to become more agile and roll out features faster. To be honest, I am not much of a fan of books ( technical), so if you are going to spend money then I suggest buying this book.

 

Now the one that really helped me learn Ruby and Rails was the community. Find a local Ruby user group, participate in its discussions, take part in its monthly meetups. These will help you find personal mentors and a lot of cool people like you who knows Ruby is worth learning.. :D

Those from Kerala India, can join the Kerala Ruby User Group Mailing List Also read as much materials you can find about ruby and rails, reddit is a good source of interesting news for Ruby.

 

Q) Is it required to know Ruby before you learn rails?

Well from experience the answer is

  • NO

    • . You don’t have to know ruby to learn rails, but those have do can learn it much faster, and understand the reasons behind the various jargons used in rails. But from my personal experience, as a person who learned Rails before properly understanding Ruby. If you have a better understanding of the ruby language, then the picture you have about the possibilities with rails would become limitless.. Its like you won’t feel Rails can limit you, in anyway.

     

    Q) How can I learn Ruby?

    Well Ruby has been around for a long time, there are plenty of how to guides and basic tutorials in Ruby. So a quick Google will get you a lot of results. Some good websites that I would suggest is

    For those who wish to have a cheat sheet available to help you, can use this website http://overapi.com/ruby/

    Q) How long will it take to learn Ruby/Rails? Well I do not have a proper answer to that one, I have been working in ruby for some time now. And even does it for a living, but I still believe that I have a lot to learn. Every new project has been challenging and has introduced me to more and more possibilities with Ruby. Thus I guess as they say, the possibilities are limitless as the Human Imagination.

    My advice to beginners would be to be, not concerned about how long it would take, and just concentrate on learning. Try out various ideas that you might have, one good exercise that I did was try to implement all the commands in a linux terminal through ruby. Get to know the community, try to contribute to various opensource projects and always keep on coding… =)

     

    Happy coding..

     

    ——

    Harisankar P S,

    Chief Innovations Officer.

    PS: this is just my list, if you know some good online resources. Please do add them as comments, it would help those who are starting out with Ruby and Rails. Also sorry for any typo or grammatical errors.

    1. By Vj 13/12/2012 at 05:25AM


      There is a nice one for starters at codeshool http://www.codeschool.com/courses/rails-for-zombies-redux

    2. By Harisankar 13/12/2012 at 06:05AM


      Rails Zombie is a good vedio tutorial, least boring ones, but it hard for people to sit watching a tutorial video’s for hours.. But if you can then I would higly recomend it.

      Rails Zombie teaches you the basics, its convection, and the basic how to. But it doesn’t provide much details why it is done so. Good for begineers, but after finishing the tutorial I suggest looking into a few others as well..

    3. By Shyam Prakash 13/12/2012 at 06:27AM


      I think you can find the tutorial on youtube. You could be a starter on youtube and I dam sure this will help you a lot

    4. By Harisankar 13/12/2012 at 07:23AM


      @shyam

      Yes you can, but the quality is varying… there are lot of poor quality video’s in youtube, that doen’t even cover the proper basics… If learning form youtube, i would suggest have look at the rating and comments.. see what others are saying about the tutorials and them learn.. If the basic foundation is not strong, then one can face a lot of problem later in his studies.

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