Learning Ruby

[TFrank2]

Hey Everybody,

I'm thinking about starting to learn Ruby and then RoR. Could anyone recommend me with any good books, sites, tutorials, etc. I'm pretty new with programming and coding, and I don't really know any other languages except a little HTML here and there.

Thanks,

Tom

[Ancient Dragon]

never heard of the language. But did you try google ?

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,710,000 for Ruby programming language. (0.18 seconds)

Now I'm not saying you have to read each and every one of those hite, but the first few will probably be helpful. Nearly 2 million links is an awful lot of reading. :mrgreen:

[big_k105]

http://www.rubyonrails.org/

If you go to the ruby on rails website, there are tutorials and lists of tutorials and books that will help you out.

http://www.rubyonrails.org/docs
http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1816/top-ruby-on-rails-tutorials

The book that they recommend on there is called Agile web development with rails. I have heard good things about this book as well. I plan on buying the second edition when it comes out in a week or two.
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails/index.html

That should enough to get you started and on your way :) good luck

[stymiee]

A good forum for discussing Ruby is http://railsforum.com/. The guys who run it are very knowledgeable and it's a nice environment for learning.

[jwenting]

In fact you should start learning Ruby WELL first and only after achieving that try for Rails...

Way too many (mostly young) people dive into the deep end without understanding the fundamentals and either turn into coders producing crap (and thus making the entire industry look bad) or give up in frustration.

You don't learn to fly by taking a 767 and sitting next to the captain, you don't learn to program by taking a web framework and starting to hack away.

Get this book instead: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/index.html
which is pretty much the bible of Ruby as well as a goog tutorial.

[chewbacca]

Hi Tom,

I am also in the process of learning ruby, and have compiled a list of what I believe to be over 80 high quality links to aid my learning effort.

http://del.icio.us/klougnot/rails/

These are all my personal rails bookmarks. I spent over a week compiling this list. I hope it is useful to you.

By the same token, let me know if you come up with any good resources.

Cheers

Kyle

Hey Everybody,

I'm thinking about starting to learn Ruby and then RoR. Could anyone recommend me with any good books, sites, tutorials, etc. I'm pretty new with programming and coding, and I don't really know any other languages except a little HTML here and there.

Thanks,

Tom

[pty]

I am a rails developer and as jtwenting said earilier in this thread, it is important to have a decent grasp of ruby before trying to get your head around rails.

I did a fair amount of python at uni and found ruby quite similar. The pragramatic programmers books also definately helped but the best way of learning imho is to try to make something.

rubyquiz has a list of problems that will challenge you; pick one - spend 10-20 minutes thinking about how you'll solve it (i usually scribble down diagrams/psuedocode etc on a pad) and have a go.

If you get stuck use the ruby book, ruby's api documentation, google, koders.com, ruby lists, irc etc.

You'll find with one or two under your belt it gets easier and the amount of time you spend thinking about ruby decreases and the amount of time you spend thinking about the problem increases (the way it should be!).

You will find the rails framework makes a LOT more sense if you understand ruby and you will be a lot more productive from the start.

Another thing that kind of goes without saying is choose a decent environment/editor to work with; you want something that at least has syntax highlighting.