Quote:
Originally Posted by myNameIsInga
Thanks, will do that
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I have been working on ruby on rails for the last 2.5 months after having not done any web stuff in 10+ years or programming in a long time (and never at a high level). Since I had to learn a bunch of different stuff at once, as well as getting used to linux (never used anything but windows) it was a steep learning curve, but now I am learning quite quickly and having a good time.
I figure I'll just throw out all the resources I've used to anyone on these forums that is interested in RoR.
Setup: I'm running ubuntu 11.10 on a virtualbox with a windows 7 64 host. Plenty of tutorials on how to setup a virtualbox, and how to setup RoR on ubuntu using RVM (just do this, it'll make your life easier. Don't try to use RoR on windows, it's just more of a hassle than it's worth). Macs are also perfect to work on as well. I then connect to it through a host-only adapter, and do my editing on windows using sublime 2 (which is a nice lightweight text editor). If anyone is interested in using this setup just PM me and I can walk you through it, as I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why I was being a moron. I run console commands either in the virtualbox or using putty.
Resources:
codeschool.com is pretty awesome actually. Rails for zombies is a free intro course, as well as "try ruby", both of which have screencasts followed by in browser code challenges. They also have a bunch of pay classes on html/css/jquery/intermediate rails stuff, which is only like $20/month and you get prizes like free peepcasts (pretty cool stuff on there) or a free month of pro subscriptions on railscasts.
The best resource by far was the book Rails 3 tutorial by Michael Hartl. You basically build twitter from scratch using RSpec (testing framework), git (version control), both of which are great to learn. There's enough good CSS/HTML in there to help you along if you're stuck with that as well, and it's great to see stuff like authentication written from scratch. I also loved the screencasts of the book, which were something like $80 but well worth it. 15+ hours of him talking through the creation process which is super helpful. I think there's a new version of the book/screencasts coming out, so check to see that it's the 3.1+ version before getting it at this point.
Learning how to do test driven development (TDD) with rspec is just huge. I haven't found another resource that's 1/2 as useful as that book. It's just a practice you should adopt if you want to develop in RoR.
railscasts is a great resource, and once you start working on your own you should just check to see if there is a cast up for the problem you're working on. Saves a lot of time, though he does neglect to test in them (for time constraints).
safaribooksonline is well worth the money to get access to tons of books on programming for something like $20/month.
I'd start by doing the sample twitter app a few times until you 100% understand everything that's going on in there, including git and rspec (you should probably skip the tests the first time through, but make sure to go back and learn them). Then start adding stuff to site like comment support, private messaging, an API, etc to learn. Then build your own site from scratch. Doing is the best way to learn once you get a handle on stuff.
When you start really make sure you get a handle on the MVC (model view controller) logic, and also making sure you understand about REST is important too. Most intro sites/books go into these, but don't just gloss over them as the sooner you understand them, the sooner you'll start getting the big picture.
And if you ever get bugs just google them, there's usually a solution on stackoverflow (or search that site) and you'll get unstuck very quickly.
Hope this helps someone at some point.
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