How did you learn Ruby on Rails?
Adam
Screencasts?
Books?
Tutorials?
Just playing with it?
Classes?
Mentor?
Blogs?
Divine knowledge?
Other?
This should be interesting.
-Adam
Jodi Showers
do
Ryan Bigg (Radar)
Ryan Bigg
http://www.frozenplague.net
Feel free to add me to MSN and/or GTalk as this email.
Andrew Skegg
michael_teter
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 Development
with Rails".
On May 11, 10:33 pm, Andrew Skegg <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net>
wrote:
Thorsten Mueller
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.
David A. Black
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!
George Bray
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 Fernandez et al. RailsSpace is also spot on.
And don't forget http://railscasts.com and http://peepcode.com - invaluable advice from the masters.
George
Phlip
> 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
Sazima
- reading (AWDR2, tutorials)
- watching (RailsCasts, Bala Paranj)
- coding
- discussing (camps, this list).
Cheers, Sazima
Phlip
> 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!
lxp149
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.
Ar Chron
> 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.
elle
> > I curious how everyone here learned Ruby on Rails?
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 Ruby 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.
schof
> is a good book, it was just over my head for someone that never
> touched either.
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
Ryan Bigg (Radar)
Greg Donald
> 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 Donald
http://destiney.com/
Dave Rothlisberger
> Someone who can't even teach themselves something as simple, well
I think he meant hire PHP programmers and train them up in RoR.
David A. Black
On Mon, 12 May 2008, schof wrote:
>
>> 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.
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 :-)
schof
> 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.
> 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 :-)
Rails. That's exactly why I'm recommending people buy your book to
learn just the right amount of Ruby and then AWDWR to learn Rails in
detail. I'm actually a fan of the book so hopefully that came across
in my earlier post.
> David
Sean
Frederick Cheung
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
Ar Chron
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)
What? You mean 'this \n string' and "this \n string" aren't the same?!?
;)
schof
> first chunk down, no-one is going to plough through the standard
> library reference cover to cover.
fairness I learned quite a bit of Ruby before I picked it up.)
> 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)
that you do not need to know the language cold before doing productive
things in Rails. I probably knew more then 20% of Ruby and I also had
a very solid foundation in MVC before I jumped into Rails.
Of course a solid understanding of Ruby is necessary to ultimately be
successful in Rails. Different people have different learning
styles. I enjoyed learning Ruby by doing a lot of examination of the
Rails source code itself as well as some of the more interesting
plugins. Every time I found that I didn't understand something then I
would go to Pickaxe or whatever and read up on it.
> Fred
Sean
Phlip
> > 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.
reading comprehension...
--
Phlip
David A. Black
On Tue, 13 May 2008, 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.
>
>> 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 :-)
>
> I didn't suggest that it was supposed to be a complete guide to
> Rails.
I understood; that's what I meant when I said I agree with you :-) My
"it isn't supposed to be" was just amplifying that point.
> That's exactly why I'm recommending people buy your book to
> learn just the right amount of Ruby and then AWDWR to learn Rails in
> detail. I'm actually a fan of the book so hopefully that came across
> in my earlier post.
It did, and I appreciate it.
Greg Willits
and I think there's two very different things to distinguish:
learning how to program, and learning Ruby/Rails as an additional set
of tools to use.
The orginal poster wasn't specific about whether the "learner" was
new to programming.
My first programming was AppleSoft in 1981. I immediately jumped into
Assembly Language after that, and the first thing I remember about
that being difficult was all the new players: CPU codes, assembler
codes, compiler, editor macros, ROM routines. AppleSoft, with the
exceptions of a few DOS commands was pretty much a self contained
environment. The hard part wasn't the assebly language itself, it was
in reading examples and figuring out which player was responsible for
which lines of code. Of course back then, I was buying the equivalent
of $50 books just because 20 pages were different than the rest of my
books. The internet is awesome!!
Anyway... HTML is like AppleSoft in being self contained. One can
learn that and get a lot done with nothing else (not even CSS).
If one has done HTML and maybe some rudimentary CSS, the leap to
Rails (or any web framework) is enormous. Inherently in a
"professional" environment like that you're thrust into the added
layers of advanced CSS, Javascript, Ruby, Rails, using Terminal
commands to even get the parts installed, and it isn't long before
you have to know a little Apache etc.
To me _that_ is what gets overwhelming.
I've been doing OO, framework-driven, high-security intranet apps
with Lasso for many years now, but switching to Rails was even a bit
overwhelming given all the new players: Ruby, Rails, Gems, Rake,
mongrel, monit to keep mongrel/Rails in line, etc.
To even get a teeny bit of Rails working reliably and securely takes
a large effort in support structure. Compared to Lasso's turn-key
environemnt, it can kind of nuke all the claimed productivity gains
for a long time until all these peripheral pieces are absorbed as well.
How did I learn Rails? I had to study Ruby first. Rails'
interpretation of "beautiful" code made no sense to me at all until I
understood Ruby. Then I could understand why certain Rail's
aesthetics were chosen.
I used the two Pragmatic books to start with (I absorb books like
air, so the more the better). And I now have Ruby Way, Rails Way, and
some others as references too. I do read them cove to cover so I know
what's in there, and then I crack 'em open several times a day to
when I find myself in new territory.
Without a doubt blogs are a huge help because sometimes you just
don't know how to ask the question, so googling helps find jargon,
which helps form better questions, which ultimately helps me even use
the books better. No doubt that a combination of book, blog, and talk
lists are essential to getting up to speed quickly.
I only used the pickaxe demo up to a certain point. As soon as I
could figure out how to put together some pages, then I explored with
all kinds of variation of that and wrote an indepth discovery of
assembling views, templates, partials, and layouts http://
www.railsdev.ws/blog/3/modular-page-assembly-in-rails/
After that I explored ActiveRecord and in particular, validations.
Didn't like the defaults, so wrote an extensive custom validations
library http://www.railsdev.ws/blog/11/custom-validations-in-rails/
I tend to explore in layers. Of course one has to do some cross-
cutting tracers to get anything done, but once I get functional, I
tend to build up depth by layers. Explore views to the nth, then
explore validations to the nth, then Ajax to the nth, then error
handling, etc, etc. This way I dont write too much crappy code, just
incomplete code which I find much easier and faster to add to/
refactor as I build a real application.
Oops. sorry, kind of long winded...
-- gw