

Ask HN: Learning Ruby on Rails - gsmaverick

I am wanting to learn RoR.  I don't really know Ruby.  I currently use PHP &#38; Python.  What sites and/or books should I read/use?
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carbon8
Guides:

<http://guides.rubyonrails.org/>

<http://asciicasts.com/> (text versions of the railscasts mentioned below)

Screencasts:

<http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts>

<http://railscasts.com/>

Books:

[http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-
development-...](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-
with-rails-third-edition)

<http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_arr/advanced-rails-recipes>

And others in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails sections at prag progammers:
<http://www.pragprog.com/categories>

The "pickaxe book" (<http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ruby/programming-ruby>) is
often considered the standard Ruby reference, and there is a version for 1.9.

API:

<http://railsapi.com/>

<http://api.rubyonrails.org/>

<http://www.gotapi.com/rubyrails>

Conference presentations:

<http://www.confreaks.com/events>

Ruby and Rails projects are abundant on github, providing lots of example
code.

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natemartin
I recently relearned RoR after not using it for a while. I was recommended
[http://pragprog.com/titles/rails2/agile-web-development-
with...](http://pragprog.com/titles/rails2/agile-web-development-with-rails)
and I definitely found it to be a good book.

What helped me the most was to just jump into a project and start coding. I
decided to try to do a clone of twitter, just to see if I could get that
working. It helped that I had a few friends who were good rails hackers that I
could go to with questions.

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andhapp
IMO you should learn ruby and rails framework at the same time. The knowledge
of ruby will help you gain a deeper understanding of rails inner workings like
the use of method_missing, concept of self and so on. I would recommend The
Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan. The Pragmatic Programmer's book
Programming Ruby is quite good as well.

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biz2hack
Hey! I recommend you check out #hnbeginners on irc.freenode.net ! People there
would be very happy to help when you have questions!

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neohacks
I liked <http://www.javapassion.com/rubyonrails>

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tkahn6
I would seriously recommend you pick up 'The Rails Way' by Obie Fernandez.

The Rails framework and methodology/philosophy is somewhat hard to just "get
into". A complete picture of what's going on - ActiveRecord, Migrations, etc -
is incredibly hard to get from the "15 minute blog" screencasts.

I picked up the book last night and so far it's going well.

