Path to Ruby on Rails Excellence

[Scott Haines]

Last Class I was asked about how I learned what I know and what sort
of road map helped me get to my current level of knowledge. So here is
the least complicated roadmap, and I hope it helps.

Start.
1. XHtml/html5
If you dont know how or why a web page works the way it does then it
will be very difficult to get ahead with ruby on rails / understand
the V in MVC. My best advice is to get a good book, or a few good
books and really walk through it from front cover to back cover. Any
book on CSS will teach you web markup as well.

2. CSS2 / CSS3
Good markup Is swell, but if it looks like an entry in a scientific
notes application circa 1960 you need to do better. Peoples
expectations for streamlined web beauty is a pain when first starting
out with HTML/CSS, but just remember it makes sense from a semantic
point of view to separate markup from style. ( look up a definition of
the semantic web for a more detailed overview of separation of
content )

3. JavaScript / jQuery
The x in xHtml stands for eXtensible, and this means customization,
and luckily you can weave your own creativity into what is called the
DOM ( Document Object Model ) through the use of good id tags, rel
tags and a handful of other tags that will help you target GUI with
JavaScript. I mention jQuery because it is a liteweight framework for
JavaScript that makes life a whole lot easier (http://jQuery.com)

4. Ruby Language
This wasn't the first solid OOP language I learned but it is the one I
can honestly say i love the most this far in my career. I feel
confident in saying, learn everything you can about Ruby and your life
will begin to have much more meaning! Honestly, it is super powerful
and human readable so you will remember ( or with minimal effort )
what your code is doing if you get back into it months down the line.
( The ruby programming language is a great book on all things Ruby -
including 1.9 release - it is in my book list in this group under
pages )

5. The REST of Rails
Get into rails, dissect it, break it, hack it, put it back together
again and read as much as you can about it. The framework is written
using best practices, literally nothing was done by whim, so pick
everything apart and begin to thick in the rails way. ( the rails way
3 is being released on dec 27 it is about 600 pages on the framework
written by Obie Fernandez )

6. Servers
I prefer Linux servers, especially Centos, however it will take a
little bash scripting, some perl and some common sense, but with
practice and patience, knowing how the server you deploy on works
makes a world of difference and can really make the difference between
a good application and a speedy application. ( luckily, you don't have
to learn unix/*nix environment programming if you want to pay to use a
service like heroku or engine yard to host your rails application )

7. MySql
ActiveRecord is great, but nothing beats knowing how it actually
works. You can use the to_sql expression on your ActiveRecord calls to
learn more about mysql, or better yet, install local mysql ( install
from the binaries if your feeling brave ) and learn all about this
infamous database. Learning the command line for mysql will also be
beneficial and fun as well.

I am not sure if this covers everything, my background is interesting
since I started with visual basic in high school, moved to flash
( future splash player ) later in high school, got excited about
writing video games in flash, then moved onto front end, then backend
and now I am working in distributed high level systems. Let me know if
you have any specific questions, or want to know what the next best
step would be on your own personal ruby roadmap.

Happy Rubying.

Scott