Learning Ruby and Rails

I've been asked a good number of times about how to go about learning Ruby and Rails... for learning Rails, my answer is simple: learn Ruby first and then pick up Agile Web Development with Rails. (There are already a good number of "Rails programmers" who don't know much of Ruby... let's not add more please.)

Learning Ruby is trickier. I typically do not rely too much upon books as a starting point (as it may quickly get boring and may make you lose pace). I rely more on reading and understanding other people's code (as that's more interesting and also leads you to learn language-specific idioms... but you should be selective about whose code you wanna emulate). I do cover specific basics of any new language though as first steps.

Personally, I learnt Ruby mostly from these sources:

1. LOTS of code examples: these you'll find posted from time to time in http://www.ruby-forum.com/forum/4 or http://rubyquiz.com or people's blog posts
2. Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas: I use this book as a reference rather than end-to-end reading, mainly focusing on certain sections like how to use regular expressions, reopening classes, and so on
3. Ruby Docs: covers the core classes and modules (I refer to it typically because of a code snippet or trying to find a method that'd help me achieve a simple task)
4. irb: I spend a lot of time experimenting and validating stuff by directly typing into the live interpreter... even today I have the irb open on my laptop almost the whole day
5. Jay Fields' blog: the great thing about this ex-ThoughtWorker's blog is that it caters to beginners as well as advanced folks... I usually like his stuff around meta-programming (Note: Jay has these days started blogging about Java more than Ruby, so you'll need to visit his archives)

I've listed some more helpful links that you should check out.

If you're just looking for reasons why you should start looking into Ruby, try this article that I'd written for a magazine: Ruby: a gem of a language

Tags: technology:ruby Last modified 01:12 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 by AmanKing. Accessed 1,261 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.