Getting Started

[davidianstyle]

Hi Everyone,

I'm fairly new to DaniWeb and I was hoping I could get some advice from all you experts out there. I registered my own domain name and got a host a few days ago and am planning on building a personal website based on Ruby on Rails (I'm not so sure I understand what Ruby on Rails is...as compared to just plain Ruby). I hope to grow it into a commercial site someday, but for now, I just want to learn as much as I can. So far, my web programming experience is limited to Perl, SQL, Javascript, and HTML that I learned from work for the last two months. I don't really know much about Ruby, except that it is gaining popularity, so I bought O'Reilly's "Learning Ruby" book and am trying to pick up on it. At the same time, I am trying to learn how to make cascading stylesheets to make the formatting of my website easier and appearance cleaner. Somethings I want to learn are how to setup email and maybe a shopping cart. If anyone can point me in the right direction...advice, web tutorials, good books, examples, etc...I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!

[curvespace]

Hi there,

I'm a newbie here too - although I've been using Ruby & Rails for well over 18 months now.

Ruby, as I'm sure you know, is a very rich object-oriented scripting language. Rails is a web application framework written using Ruby; that is a vast collection of scripts, libraries and plugins that provide a MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for building modern web applications.

Rails has excellent support for AJAX and leads the way on cutting edge stuff like RESTful routing.

There are many good tutorials for Ruby itself, such as Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby:

http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

Why is a prolific Rubyist who knows his stuff & writes in a slightly (okay, very) insane style. If that isn't to your taste there is plenty more stuff out there. The definitive book on Ruby is 'Programming Ruby' (known as the 'pickaxe', due to the cover image), now it's in 2nd edition but the first is available freely online:-

http://www.rubycentral.com/pickaxe

Other useful Ruby sites are:-

http://rubyforge.org
http://www.ruby-forum.com
http://www.rubyinside.com

You can even try Ruby live in a browser here:-

http://tryruby.hobix.com

Rails is all Ruby (well, mostly) and you can't really get anywhere without a decent understanding of it.

There has been an explosion of Rails books over the last year. The ones I'd recommend are:-

Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Ed (if you only get one, get this)
Rails Recipes

Both these and 'Programming Ruby' are by the Pragmatic Programmers:
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/

Most of the Apress Rails books are good too and like the Pragmatic ones you get buy PDF versions at half the cost of the printed ones.

The best, most up to date Rails info is usually found in blogs. Some good ones to start with are:-

http://nubyonrails.com (he also does the excellent peepcode rails screencasts)
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/category/ruby-on-rails/ (they are giving away a free Rails book ATM!)
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/OtherBlogs (a big list for you to browse) through.

Hope this helps. If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to try and help.

[davidianstyle]

Wow, thanks! I really appreciate you taking the time out to write out all of that to help me out. I am sooo excited on getting started!!!

[pty]

Wow, thanks! I really appreciate you taking the time out to write out all of that to help me out. I am sooo excited on getting started!!!

Glad you're so enthusiastic about it - another invaluable resource when you're starting out is IRC; lots of knowledgable people in both #ruby-lang and #rubyonrails on freenode if you get stuck and if you just idle and watch the conversations you'll learn lots of new stuff every day

[jenishkottaram]

Dude..Thanks..Great information