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I just want to be a Ruby on Rails developer - How to get started

Antonio Djigo on December 03, 2019

Hey πŸ‘€βœ¨ I've been looking around this website to find some good resources to improve my Ruby on Rails / Developer skills during my training hours, ...
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Austine Amani

Gorails.com

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Chris Oliver • Edited

🀩 I'm glad GoRails has been usefu for you!

When I was learning Rails, I found the Metaprogramming Ruby book to be incredibly useful. It explains a lot of the metaprogramming that happens inside Rails and provides all the methods that seem magical. It helped everything make sense for me since I had come from Python originally. Highly recommend it.

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Antonio Djigo

Awesome, thanks to you both πŸ™ˆβœ¨

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Aaron H

An additional resource: The Rails X Way, by Fernandez. He usually releases s new one for each version -- X is currently 5.

The aphorism "convention over configuration" is really important in Rails, moreso than in other frameworks I've used; the Rails Way book is good at setting what the standard use cases should be. Configuration is inevitable in most apps, but we should give those compromises a heavy cost when considering them.

I would also recommend "The WellGrounded Rubyist" (David Black) for general Ruby knowledge. Black does a stellar job of accessibly covering the language and it's nuances.

The biggest mistake I see new Rails developers do (in my 8 years of experience w Rails) is project their idioms from other languages onto Ruby. This is especially noticeable if their background is in a strongly typed language (C, Java, etc) rather than ducktyped (PHP, Python, Perl). Ducktyped languages approach data and flow control a little differently --

The POODR (Practical OO design in ruby) book (by Sandi Metz) that you link in your footnotes explains some solid examples of how to do ducktyping correctly. Her talks (on YouTube) are really awesome too.

One last thing: learn to write tests. It's painful at first but is the right path and it gets a lot easier with practice. Testing is a critically integral part of Ruby & Rails, especially. Whether you pick MiniTest or Rspec (the 2 most popular frameworks) is up to you; but pick one and practice hard :)

Welcome!!

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Antonio Djigo

Awesome share of knowledge, thanks a lot for commenting!

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AlbertoM

I haven't touched Rails in almost 2 years but last time, other than reading the same books you mentioned, I also took the Rails course on Udemy by Jordan Hudgens. I don't recall the name but it was great, the instructor was very professional and I learned a lot taking that course.

I'm not sure if he released a new course for rails 6.

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Antonio Djigo

Awesome, thanks for the recommendation πŸ™ˆ

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Fernando

Hola Antonio! Some good resources you got listed here. I’m currently reading Practical Object-Oriented Design by Sandi Metz and enjoying it so far.

Glad you’re liking Ruby & Rails! I wrote a post too about my learning journey a couple years ago when I was getting started, in case you want to have a look for other resource ideas: dev.to/fdoxyz/learning-rails-in-2017

β€οΈπŸ’Ž πŸ˜„βœŒπŸΌ

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Antonio Djigo

Cool, gracias for the resources πŸ‘€βœ¨

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Julia

Thank you for sharing your experience and recommendations in Ruby development. Nowadays Ruby is among the most popular programming languages in the world. As for me, one of the best sources for learning Ruby are books, online tutorials and courses.

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Ali Sherief • Edited

I'm also trying to learn Rails, and am learn programming languages by reading the code of their test cases, and it has worked very well for me.

I think I could grab a Rails tutorial, and that will teach me the basics, and then read through the tests and maybe even the source code to learn just about everything there is to know. Of course I'll forget a lot of things I read, but I also retain a lot of function calls in my head.

And for contributing to the Rails codebase itself, it's pretty much mandatory to read its source code anyway πŸ˜„

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Ted Stresen-Reuter

Great article Antonio. Well done!

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Antonio Djigo

Thanks a lot!

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Omri Gabay

The way for me to become a Rails developer was also to join a RoR team! Haha

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Antonio Djigo

One does not simply learns Rails πŸ‘€

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Luis Gomez

Thanks ToΓ±o! I been a RoR developer for 3 years and I think is time to start reading, thank you for the books list.

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Antonio Djigo

Glad you liked it!