After almost a year of working with Rails this is my guide how to learn Rails.
Read community news
I’m reading regularly RubyFlow and Rails Envy. They keep you updated what’s happening around Ruby, so implicitely Rails. Don’t be flattened if you won’t understand too much and don’t dig into every subject. As a regular reader you’ll have a general overview about how things are gettind done, and what is the future. You’ll learn the new concepts, you’ll know the people, the applications, the new plugins, trends, etc etc.
Watch video tutorials / Screencasts
If you want to learn how to do a specific task the best way is to watch a video / screencast. Videos are the future of tutorials, they are pretty straightforward and 100% error free. Since in text documentation the author can miss something, in screencasts you can apply what you have learnt “as is”.
The best source for me is Railscasts (Ryan Bates beeing my personal RubyHero) because it has 100+ chapters and it is free! If you like to pay for content check Peepcode too.
Read the Books
You always read the latest books, Rails is changing very fast. Many successful books have updated editions, like Rails Recipes –> Advanced Rails Recipes, Agile Web Development with Rails I, II and so on.
Currently the order of searching in books when I need to know something is:
-
Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition by Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, and Mike Clark (Paperback - Dec 14, 2006) - Illustrated -
Advanced Rails Recipes by Mike Clark (Paperback - May 15, 2008) - Illustrated -
The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) by Obie Fernandez (Paperback - Nov 26, 2007) -
Advanced Rails by Brad Ediger (Paperback - Jan 11, 2008) - Illustrated -
Rails Recipes (Pragmatic Programmers) by Chad Fowler (Paperback - Jun 9, 2006)
Google & Source code documentation & Forums
Once I have no screencast / book chapter available for my topic I’ll start searching on the net.
There are too many sources out there to make your search effective. And majority of them are outdated, not updated with the latest changes. In the Ruby world there is no central repository for something, like in Wordpress let’s say, and this chaos is painful.
A very best practice is too look at the source code (of Rails, of plugins, ..) first, Ruby code is very readable.
And finally if you still have problems you can find the forum specialized on your topic and learn more, the forums I’ve tried are all alive and many good people will help you out.
Browse RubyForge projects
If you plan to create a new project first check if exists already at RubyForge.
If you need a new plugin and you don’t find in Rails plugin repositories check RubyForge.
Cut development time & learning curve by … Learning Ruby !!!
My biggest mistake was that Rails fascinated me soo much I did not pay the necessary attention to Ruby.
If I had been started with Ruby I could cut off around 30-50% of my development time & learning curve. Even today the most difficult and time consuming part in development is to write the Ruby code, not to figure out how to solve something in Rails. After all, everything is reduced to Ruby.
And maybe your next project will be not Rails, but Merb.
