I curious how everyone here learned Ruby on Rails?
Screencasts?
Books?
Tutorials?
Just playing with it?
Classes?
Mentor?
Blogs?
Divine knowledge?
Other?
This should be interesting.
-Adam
Adam -
On 11-May-08, at 8:56 PM, Adam wrote:
Divine knowledge?
Other?This should be interesting.
-Adam
do
Coded a blog in PHP and a friend showed me the infamous 15-minute rails
blog
tutorial (now outdated). I coded the blog in Rails and I was amazed at
what
it does.
On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Jodi S. [email protected]
wrote:
Tutorials?
do
–
Ryan B.
Feel free to add me to MSN and/or GTalk as this email.
Adam wrote:
I curious how everyone here learned Ruby on Rails?
Screencasts?
Books?
Tutorials?
Just playing with it?
Classes?
Mentor?
Blogs?
Divine knowledge?
Other?This should be interesting.
-Adam
Screencasts?
Books?
Tutorials?
Just playing with it?
Blogs?
Still learning… always learning.
i applied for a job in the internet business (after being an application
developer with experience in Pascal, VB, C++ and basics in HTML & JS)
send them an email, was asked if i knew Ruby on Rails (i didn’t)
got the job anyway and started learning by doing
(my boss being in the US for the first three weeks i started learning,
so couldn’t help me in that time), following some tutorials and books
but then had to jump into real world programming very fast to get a job
done for a customer.
had my first web-app online after around two months
i was lucky of course, since working with experienced programmers helps
a lot with the “best practices” part and doing things the Rails way.
I followed a few tutorials and screencasts. They gave me a little
sample of the power of Rails, but they were of more promotional value
to me than education.
I purchased and read the first several chapters of Agile Web
Development with Rails. That really demonstrated the speed with which
someone who knows how to use Rails can make useful things happen. It
did not, for me, really guide me. I’m sure it was great for a lot of
people, but it didn’t talk to me the way the next book did.
RailsSpace was a fantastic book. That’s the one that really taught me
Rails. Even the Rough Cuts version, which I bought in PDF form, was
fantastic. It wasn’t just the normal content of the book that was so
helpful, but some of the commentary and special sauce the authors
provided.
I did a couple of production sites following closely the methods from
RailsSpace. The actual full-site development, along with the
fantastic book, gave me a good solid understanding of Rails.
That being said, there’s still a TON for me to learn about Rails (and
I get frustrated at times at the difficulty in finding answers to some
of my questions). I do wish that Rails had an active IRC group like
Plone does. The Plone IRC channel is awesome.
That’s a meandering answer :), so in summary I suggest “get the book
RailsSpace”, and probably also get the book “Agile Web D.
with Rails”.
On May 11, 10:33 pm, Andrew S. [email protected]
Hi –
On Sun, 11 May 2008, Adam wrote:
I curious how everyone here learned Ruby on Rails?
Screencasts?
Books?
Yes to books – specifically, writing one 
Believe me, you learn a
ton doing that. Same with developing training materials and
curriculum. It’s not just a brain-dump; you really have to study the
stuff and think about it a lot.
Tutorials?
Just playing with it?
Yes to both.
Classes?
Mentor?
Re: classes, see above about developing training materials. Doing the
actual training is also an on-going learning process. (If it were just
a brain-dump, I’d be bored to death with it by now, which I’m not.)
No single mentor but lots of discussion and exchange with friends and
colleagues involved in learning and developing Rails and Rails apps. I
think we’ve all benefited from the availability of a lot of people.
Blogs?
Yes.
Divine knowledge?
Other?
Answering questions and reading other people’s answers on mailing
lists.
David
–
Rails training from David A. Black and Ruby Power and Light:
INTRO TO RAILS June 9-12 Berlin
ADVANCING WITH RAILS June 16-19 Berlin
INTRO TO RAILS June 24-27 London (Skills Matter)
See http://www.rubypal.com for details and updates!
Well, if David won’t pimp his book “Ruby For Rails”, I will. It was
my
first book in this area and a great one at that. Getting to know ruby
closely before doing the hard-core rails stuff was great for me.
Then, get yourself “The Rails Way” by Obie F. et al. RailsSpace
is
also spot on.
And don’t forget http://railscasts.com and http://peepcode.com -
invaluable
advice from the masters.
George
By:
- reading (AWDR2, tutorials)
- watching (RailsCasts, Bala P.)
- coding
- discussing (camps, this list).
Cheers, Sazima
i applied for a job in the internet business (after being an application
developer with experience in Pascal, VB, C++ and basics in HTML & JS)
send them an email, was asked if i knew Ruby on Rails (i didn’t)
got the job anyway and started learning by doing
Tell that to my bosses. We currently specialize in hiring PhP coders and
teaching them on the job via pair-programming.
So another bullet point for Adam is:
- pairing!
Adam wrote:
Other?
Many feeb attempts, over ~10 years, to build gee-whiz websites using
pathetically inferior tools, followed by building a nice website from
scratch
using raw Ruby!
–
Phlip
The book Agile web development with rails is great. I’m reading it as
of right now after many frustrated attempts with the free tutorials
around the web. The thing you have to be careful about is that rails
2.0 is quite different from the 1.x version the tutorials are usually
written against. So I had tons of problems going through the tutorials
since I like to always download the latest and greatest of anything.
The free stuff rarely mentions about the rail version differences.
Also if you’re working on Windows. Download InstantRails. It’ll get
you up and running in no time. I never imagined building a shopping
cart in a couple days. And I’m a full-time working mom.
Adam wrote:
I curious how everyone here learned Ruby on Rails?
The first book I bought was Ruby for Rails by Black and as much as it
is a good book, it was just over my head for someone that never
touched either. I then decided to build a site with rails and used
Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce and learnt by doing.
I since also bought AWDWR, Rails Space, Learning R. and The Ruby Way
to read and use as well.
Also, many people have helped me here and other forums when I had some
troubles.
Adam wrote:
I curious how everyone here learned Ruby on Rails?
Started with an off-hand comment by one of our software architects about
“programming by convention” and “Ruby on Rails”…
Then a tutorial from the web.
Followed by an “Oh cool…”
Then AWDWR in Beta PDF…
then 2 more books, and lots of sleep-deprivation.
Getting a job in Rails and them teaching you more as you go is always
good
too.
On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 12:07 PM, Phlip [email protected] wrote:
Tell that to my bosses. We currently specialize in hiring PhP coders and
teaching them on the job via pair-programming.
Specialize? That’s hilarious. Someone who can’t even teach
themselves something as simple, well documented, and well commented as
PHP should probably consider a career in something other than software
development. Being a programmer means being able to solve problems,
with teaching yourself new concepts, almost daily, being the very
least of that set of problems.
–
Greg D.
http://destiney.com/
The first book I bought was Ruby for Rails by Black and as much as it
is a good book, it was just over my head for someone that never
touched either.
I’m glad someone mentioned this book. Its the first Rails book I read
as well. I think this is the best book to learn a little introductory
Ruby in the context of Rails. Its a poor book for learning Rails
itself (AWDWR is much better for that) but its pretty good at teaching
you Ruby without overwhelming you.
A huge part of the book is actually learning Ruby. At times it was
even frustrating b/c I wanted to learn something about Rails and I was
running of pages. Most of the Ruby books I have read are really
overwhelming. IMO you can do plenty with RoR and only know the key
20% features of the language.
So I recommend a solid Ruby intro book plus AWDWR. Rails Way is also
very good but not for beginners.
Sean
Hi –
On Mon, 12 May 2008, schof wrote:
A huge part of the book is actually learning Ruby. At times it was
even frustrating b/c I wanted to learn something about Rails and I was
running of pages. Most of the Ruby books I have read are really
overwhelming. IMO you can do plenty with RoR and only know the key
20% features of the language.
Do you know the other 80% thoroughly enough to be confident about
that?
BTW I agree with you that R4R isn’t a Rails manual. I might word it
differently than you did But it definitely isn’t supposed to be,
and never was meant to be, anyone’s one and only Rails guide. People
have gotten lots of different mileage out of it but on the whole I get
the impression that its sweet spot for a lot of people is as a second
book. Or maybe a 1.5th book
David
–
Rails training from David A. Black and Ruby Power and Light:
INTRO TO RAILS June 9-12 Berlin
ADVANCING WITH RAILS June 16-19 Berlin
INTRO TO RAILS June 24-27 London (Skills Matter)
See http://www.rubypal.com for details and updates!
On May 13, 12:18 am, “Greg D.” [email protected] wrote:
Someone who can’t even teach themselves something as simple, well
documented, and well commented as PHP […]
I think he meant hire PHP programmers and train them up in RoR.
On 13 May 2008, at 16:49, schof wrote:
Do you know the other80% thoroughly enough to be confident about
that?I guess I don’t know what I don’t know so its hard to say.
My
point is only that while I constantly find myself learning more about
Ruby each day, I am still very productive in Rails. IMO if you tried
to pick up one of those massive Ruby language books (The Ruby Way in
particular but also Pickaxe) then you could find yourself a little bit
overwhelmed.
The pickaxe is pretty easy going I thought. You only need to read the
first chunk down, no-one is going to plough through the standard
library reference cover to cover. The danger of not fully grasping a
language like ruby that has quite a lot of subtleties is that
(especially with a framework like rails that tends to use them) is
that you could get yourself horribly confused when things go wrong and
just end up stabbing around in the dark. (and in general when
debugging and so on it’s really important to understand exactly what’s
going on)
Fred