
The Ruby on Rails Tutorial for Rails 4.0 final - mhartl
http://news.railstutorial.org/rails-tutorial-for-rails-4-0-final/
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Cowen
This is excellent news. Hartl's Rails Tutorial was easily one of the best
tutorials for any full-stack framework that I've ever read.

Too many tutorials come up with overly-simplified examples that have no real
utility. I hate looking at a tutorial that shows you how to build a toy app
that is barely usable even by its own creator.

But Hartl's book takes you through one very feasible web app (a Twitter clone)
while explaining common tools and practices in the process. TDD, Heroku, Git,
Bundler, the works. When I finished the book, I showed it to some non-
technical friends and we played with it for a while with absolutely no
problems. Not once did I have to say "well, this is just a demo."

If you want to learn Rails, you won't find a better place to start than
Hartl's Rails tutorial.

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mscarborough
Yes, just to join the echo chamber for a minute.

For someone new to Rails, but not to OOP/web dev/sysadmin, Hartl did a really
great job on highlighting how to work through the many decisions that are
already made for you in Rails, but also some nice Ruby tips. He would also be
really good about keeping it up to date and adding errata where needed to fix
minor inaccuracies.

Totally worth the money, from a guy who learned Ruby/Rails from him and Obie
Fernandez's book and struck on independent contracting.

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jongold
I basically owe a large proportion of how I earn money today to Michael Hartl
- spending $100 on his screencast a few years ago was the best investment I
could have made.

RailsTutorial is holistic, practical, and very well paced for total beginners.

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lquist
I find the Rails tutorial to be a terrible _intro to Rails_ (unless if you're
already a web dev, or a crack dev), but a fantastic _intro to TDD with Rails_.
I recommend JumpStartLabs' Blogger tutorial as the best intro to Rails.

~~~
mhartl
I have tentative plans at some point to make a product called something like
_Learn Enough Rails To Be Dangerous_ to fill this niche. The plan would be to
cover just the basics of Rails, while largely omitting TDD. Leaving out TDD
would definitely be easier on a beginner—but it would also undoubtedly make
him dangerous.

~~~
lquist
_I have tentative plans at some point to make a product called something like
Learn Enough Rails To Be Dangerous to fill this niche. The plan would be to
cover just the basics of Rails, while largely omitting TDD._

Awesome! I look forward to it!

 _Leaving out TDD would definitely be easier on a beginner—but it would also
undoubtedly make him dangerous._

I would think the opposite actually: learning TDD often gives people a false
sense of safety.

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jwarren
I've been working through the beta version of your Rails 4 book for the past
couple of weeks, and it's been an absolutely stellar experience. As an
experienced front-end web developer, I've not had proper experience with TDD
before, but your book emphasises it's important while keeping it relatively
easy. Only rarely have I transcribed some code without really understanding
why or what it's for, and I feel like I genuinely get how my application (thus
far) works.

My only concerns are with a few of the Rails conventions, which are probably
due to my own conventions with JS and PHP.

Thank you for your awesome work. I'll definitely be buying a copy asap.

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speg
I just spent an hour trying to set up Rails. Failed when running rails server
on some sqlite error. Mi googled the error but none of the suggestions have
worked.

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habosa
Rails Tutorial 2.3 not only taught me how to do Rails, but how to do web
development. I had never made a non-static website before in my life or
touched a line of Ruby code and I had no problem working through Hartl's
tutorial. That really says something about the quality, most other framework
books require years of web-dev knowledge and exposure to the language.

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roin
For someone who hadn't done web development in ten years and then wanted to
get back into it with Rails, this tutorial (for v3.2) was perfect. As others
have noted, it demystifies the whole stack, even including tools such as
Sublime Text as related plugins. Hartl is a great instructor.

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rmoriz
thank you for your ongoing, awesome work :)

~~~
mhartl
You're welcome!

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scubasteve
Was waiting on this version to start reading your book and start learning
rails. Excellent news! Looking forward to reading this.

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richkuo
This tutorial literally changed my life.

Props for making the best RoR tutorial available.

Thank you mhartl

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thehodge
Is there a Rails Tutorial style book for Django?

~~~
neilkimmett
Theres the Django tutorial but its not quite as comprehensive as Hartl's Rails
Tutorial.

[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/)

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straws
Still no rbenv love?

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mhartl
I might add it in the full 3rd edition. The problem is that rvm and rbenv
can't coexist on the same machine, so the barrier to using both is high. In
particular, it means that I haven't been able to test rbenv myself, so I don't
know it. I'd probably have to install, say, a Linux virtual machine just to
use it.

That said, if you or someone you know would be willing to write up some
material on rbenv to parallel the rvm instructions, I'd be happy to include it
in the book. Please send any correspondence to admin at railstutorial dot org.

~~~
drewda
You can almost run rvm and rbenv in parallel by installing them under separate
system users.

That's how I handle having some clients who use one and some that use the
other.

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Pym
RVM, seriously..?

~~~
jwarren
Is there a better solution out there? I've found it to be (relatively)
painless thus far, though I've been caught out a couple of times.

~~~
hackerboos
I like rbenv, it's pretty lightweight.

The only reason to stick with RVM was gem-sets but everybody users bundler
these days anyway,.

