

Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 2nd edition - mhartl
http://news.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-2nd-edition

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msluyter
Went through this recently and it's great. Bootstrap is a nice addition -- I
know people complain about too many Bootstrap sites, but developing something
that looks good right off the bat is highly satisfying.

The only problem I ran into is that when using spork and guard, the test
environment didn't always get reloaded (not sure if I recall the exact
conditions in which that happened) and so I got some unexpected errors/test
failures on occasion (resolved by restarting spork/guard). There's a stack
overflow entry on this, iirc.

~~~
mhartl
The Spork caveat is mentioned in the book
([http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/static-
pages#code:rsp...](http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/static-
pages#code:rspec_drb)):

 _One word of advice when using Spork: after changing a file included in the
prefork loading (such as routes.rb), you will have to restart the Spork server
to load the new Rails environment. If your tests are failing when you think
they should be passing, quit the Spork server with Control-C and restart it._

That doesn't mean you won't end up on Stack Overflow, though. I end up there
all the time myself, and I wrote the damn thing.

~~~
kiba
_That doesn't mean you won't end up on Stack Overflow, though. I end up there
all the time myself, and I wrote the damn thing._

If that was eliminated, than spork would be an absolute no brainer.

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airlair
Beginner here, I'm a mechanical engineer with very little experience with
programming. I tried to follow the book this week but found it little bit
difficult to follow. Question: Should I go learn the basics of Ruby first or
should I power through hoping to learn everything along the way? If you think
that I should learn the basics first, would you recommend learnrubythehardway
or something else? Thanks in advance!

~~~
pook1e
As others have mentioned, there are plenty of good Ruby tutorials around.
Personally, I thought "why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby"[1] was pretty great. It
goes off topic quite a lot, but I think it's a joy to read while still
learning the core concepts.

[1] <http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/>

~~~
meisterbrendan
yeah. This is the best textbook I've ever read, period. The tangents are
actually quite helpful, because they keep you motivated to keep reading, and
slow down the pace a bit. Also check out tryruby.org for an awesome
interactive tutorial, which was originally written by the _poignant_ author.
Good luck, and chunky bacon (you'll get it when you read the book, which you
absolutely should do)!

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mhartl
tl;dr: The Rails Tutorial 2nd edition PDF is out; early access to the 2nd
edition screencasts is open; use the code "rt2ndEd" through the end of April
to get a 20% discount. Go to <http://railstutorial.org/> for more information.

By the way, I finally broke down and got an iPad (way overdue, I know), which
finally motivated me to fiddle with the Rails Tutorial PDF fonts. The result
(14pt for the main text and ~10pt for tables and code samples) was a bit
tricky to achieve, but it looks good on a Kindle and _great_ on an iPad.
Someday I may go to the trouble of making ePub and mobi formats as well, but
for now the PDF is _smokin'_.

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akurilin
Purchased and read back to back the first edition of the book. Very glad to
see an updated edition, it hasn't been that long, but a lot has changed in the
meantime!

Michael, I was looking through the online version of the book and I couldn't
find any indication that I was reading the 2nd edition. I apologize if I
simply missed it, otherwise I think it might be worthwhile mentioning in the
preface that what we're looking at the 2nd ed.

~~~
mhartl
The Rails version number is highlighted in the right-hand margin (3.2
indicating the 2nd edition). Also, to make the choice easy, the 2nd edition is
now the default.

~~~
algobait
It took me about 30 min today to figure out why when I started Chapter 5 your
Application Controller had different content than mine (missing the blueprint,
etc). Would you recommend the 2nd edition although I am halfway through the
first edition?

~~~
mhartl
Yes, I recommend switching to the 2nd edition. I suggest you start with
Chapter 3.

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studgeek
It would be nice to cover Ruby/RVM under Cygwin as well in addition to
RailsInstaller. As long as the right Cygwin packages are installed (git,
readline, wget, patch, make, gcc, libsqlite3-devel, libxml2-devel, libxslt-
devel) RVM installs just fine and then the reader will be able to follow all
the remaining examples in the book directly.

You could add something like this:

Ruby with Cygwin (Windows)

Another option on Windows is install Ruby under Cygwin. If you are already
using Cygwin then installing RVM and Ruby is done the same way you would do it
on Linux/OSX. If you do go the Cygwin route then throughout the rest of the
book just follow the Linux/OSX examples. Here are the steps:

First, make sure you have the following Cygwin packages installed: git,
readline, wget, patch, make, gcc, libsqlite3-devel, libxml2-devel, libxslt-
devel.

Then install RVM: curl -L get.rvm.io | bash

Then just follow the steps listed in the next section to install Ruby.

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nicw
I have the first edition and it's great. You can either poke around on Stack
Overflow for hours to see what the "best" approaches are - OR just get this
book and bookmark heavily :)

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alexol
I am reading the book on safaribooksonline and commit to github. (
<https://github.com/alder101/rails-tutorial> ) The book is great. Thank you
Michael.

I think that experience of reading such "Learn by example" books would be even
better if:

* Each chapter or section are issues on github.

* Examples are commits, associated with the issue.

* Extensive use of labels as book index.

~~~
mhartl
I agree in principle, but the situation you describe would be a maintenance
nightmare on my end.

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philjones88
This does look interesting. Can't quite figure out if it would suit me. I'm
interested in learning Rails but I haven't done any Ruby before. I do a lot of
C#, ASP.NET MVC, RavenDB, MySQL/SQL server and AppHarbor, so I understand MVC
and web development environment from the .NET side.

Would you think this book and screencasts would work for my skill level or
should I use another book to learn more about Ruby?

~~~
andrest
It's definitely worth reading.

Although as a person with substantial programming experience, I would
recommend you to have a look at Chapter 4 first. The first few chapters deal
with code examples that are not meant to be understood (at that point), but
knowing the "Ruby way" will help you to figure out most of it. The book also
is more holistic about Web Development; Rails, although being the main focus,
isn't all that it covers. Version Control (GIT) and Deployment are explored as
well. Also, the author having beginners in mind, goes through the terminal
stuff a bit slower.

You might find yourself skimming few pages along the way, but the book does an
extremely good job at getting you to the point where you can and know what you
want to do next.

------
stevengg
How are the 2nd edition screencasts going to differ from the first edition
ones?

~~~
mhartl
From <http://ruby.railstutorial.org/#new>:

    
    
        Fully updated for Rails 3.2 and Ruby 1.9
        All-new design using Twitter's Bootstrap
        Coverage of the new asset pipeline, including Sprockets & Sass
        Behavior-driven development (BDD) with Capybara & RSpec
        Better automated testing with Guard & Spork
        Roll your own authentication with has_secure_password
        An introduction to Gherkin & Cucumber
    

I've also converted to a two-pane editor setup using Sublime Text 2, which is
especially nice for TDD. See <http://youtu.be/REuxSzMtcJA> for a sample video.

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edwinnathaniel
I purchased the first edition, any upgrade plan?

~~~
mhartl
Check your email for a coupon code. As far as upgrading the app itself, so
much has changed that I recommend starting from scratch. (It'll go much faster
the second time around.)

~~~
edwinnathaniel
My bad, just checked my e-mail. Thanks!

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alexanderberman
Just bought the screencasts! Very excited :D

~~~
mrhlee
Same here. Looking forward to watching and learning a ton!

