Boston Ruby Project Night #1, Tuesday, June 5, 7pm @ thoughtbot, beginners welcome!

[Daniel Choi]

We're happy to announce the next novice-friendly Boston Ruby Project Night on Tuesday, June 5, 7pm @ thoughtbot.

Here's the Project Night event webpage. It links out to the RSVP list.

http://project-night.bostonrb.org/

Come to work on your own project or come help someone with theirs. Everyone is welcome and all skill levels are encouraged. Food and drinks will be provided courtesy of thoughtbot. Please RSVP if you plan to attend.

We welcome newcomers! We will have a Beginners' Corner staffed with volunteers ready to help novice Ruby or Ruby on Rails programmers get off to a running start.

Please forward to anyone you know who is interested in learning Ruby or Ruby on Rails and would like some friendly help.

Dan

[Alex Jarvis]

I'll be there

---------------------------

Alex M. Jarvis
www.AlxJrvs.com
'AlxJrvs' on Twitter

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[Brian Cardarella]

Awesome job Dan & Kevin!

- Brian

[Michael Johnson]

I have a friend who is PHP coder who wants to jump into the Rails world.
Anyone have suggestions for books/sites for a beginner who is already a
programmer? Clearly he needs to learn to finesse Ruby as much as learn
Rails so suggestions along those lines are appreciated.

I am particularly interested in the opinion of all you new folks who are
learning and doing study group -- what helped you the most?

Mike J.

[Dan McClain]

My 2 recommendations would be Pragmatic Programmer's Agile Web Development with Rails (http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-rails), and http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

The Agile Web Dev book had me programming in Rails quickly (came from a .Net background), and the Rails docs are super helpful

[Dan Croak]

Currently recommending this trail:

https://github.com/thoughtbot/trail-map/blob/master/trails/rails.md

Many other trails related to the Rails ecosystem (git, Postgres, etc.):

https://github.com/thoughtbot/trail-map/tree/master/trails

Would love to hear your experiences, whether these are helpful, and
what's missing.

[Mark Chang]

I have recommended using both the pragprog book and Michael Hartl's book

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

together.

--
Mark L. Chang

[Brandon Liu]

Dan,

Those thoughtbot trails are absolutely amazing! My thanks to both you and the thoughtbot team for putting them together!

Brandon

[Mike Vastola]

I used to be the leader of a really popular/ubiquitous student-run website/information portal at Tufts and 'brain drain' from graduates who had become expert Rubyists and the time consumed having to teach incoming members Ruby/Rails (a lot of them had something of a programming background when joining, but rarely in Ruby) had been a constant struggle, but we loved the language so much we wouldn't dare part with it.

Needless to say, a lot of time was spent on this problem. I don't think we ever quite found the perfect solution (things have become easier more recently as Rails has become more popular and people join already knowing it) to learning rails, but I'm a big fan of screencasts. One of our members spoke highly of Rails for Zombies, though it starts at a really low level (it assumes no programming skills, which isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're not familiar with Ruby syntax and you fast-forward a bit at the beginning).  I've watched the intro video and it looks pretty cool, if it is geared toward someone with a short attention span (i.e. college students :-p).

Once you get more comfortable with Ruby and want to learn about various features of Rails and gems you can use, it's hard to beat RailsCasts.

Mike

[Michael Johnson]

Thanks for all the responses guys.

Pragramatic and Hartl are great -- I particularly like Hartl for
beginners as he goes through the steps of installing the environment and
other practical details.

Dan C. thanks for the reminder -- I just read about the new trails but
promptly forgot about them in all the hustle and bustle of things going
on this week.

Also Mike V., Railcasts *headsmack* how many of those have I watched
over the years?

Mike