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Nick Taylor
Nick Taylor

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at iamdeveloper.com

What are/were your go to resources for learning Ruby and Rails?

I'm completely new to Ruby, but am not a stranger to backend dev (.NET, Nodejs).

I've checked out the Ruby Quick start, but aside from that, what resources, whether they be books, online resources, videos etc. would you recommend to someone looking to get into the world of Ruby and Ruby on Rails?

Bonus points if you can suggest an e-book before I go camping in three hours? 😜

Top comments (43)

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alchermd profile image
John Alcher • Edited

I'm a PHP developer, but Ruby is one of the languages that I started with a couple years back. The Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl is highly recommended back then. I learned a lot from that book that is still valuable even when I'm on a different ecosystem now. Though it's quite geared towards beginners... but it wouldn't hurt to check it out.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Michael Hartl's work is so popular that it's practically the canonical source of Rails. Like, even if it's beginner material, it's worth skimming if only to know what other folks are being taught.

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Amit Patel

True. We used it to train every intern we hired for about 7 years now. Hats off Michael Hartl♥️

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Destiny Aigbe

Train on which platform please?, I would like to be a part

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Ben Halpern

To supplement more straightforward tutorials, the Destroy All Software screencasts are absolutely fantastic. Some Ruby stuff, some Rails stuff, some computer theory, Python stuff, it's all over the map, and all incredibly valuable.

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Stanislav(Stas) Katkov

I would say that guides.rubyonrails.org is a first place to learn.

Back in the days, RailsCasts and Rails for Zombies was a thing. Nowadays they are not updated anymore (if I remember correctly).

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Anandhu Manoj

Destroy All Software is really cool!

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Steven Bruno

The Odin Project curates some of the best ruby and rails resources within their curriculum.

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Destiny Aigbe

Yeah, that's also good.

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Robert • Edited

Hey!

  1. I'm curating a resources list on GitHub, my suggestion is to
  2. join the ruby on rails slack community of that list ( #beginners_and_mentors channel )
  3. start learning with railstutorial.org
  4. maybe dive into the ruby exercises of exercism.io
  5. gorails.com & railscasts.com are the go to video channels.

Feel free to reach out for specific questions!

Have fun & good luck!

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destiny01 profile image
Destiny Aigbe

Exactly

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Brian Kephart
  • Ruby Koans: Learn by testing, using Minitest.
  • CodeAcademy: Introductory projects for both Ruby and Rails.
  • CodeFights: Programming puzzles to solve in the language of your choice. This is fun because you get to see how much shorter the solutions are in Ruby compared to many other languages.😀 Also has competitive/social features if that's appealing to you.

I've recently started using RuboCop in my work as well, which has unexpectedly been a great learning resource. It shows me alternate methods and idiomatic syntax that I didn't know or had forgotten about.

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Matteo Joliveau

Like with everything tech I want to learn, I start by reading any quickstart guide is listed on the official documentation, then dive right into the guts of the subject. For Rails, this means running rails new on some empty directory and try to make some kind of app I already know how to build with other languages, for example the evergreen blog platform.

Normally, official docs + lots of googling and StackOverflow for every obstacle I encounter does the job nicely (at least for me)

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Duc Thien

For Ruby, I recommend this book
Effective Ruby
I think it's suitable for someone already has some background in programming and wanna learn more about Ruby.
With Rails, nothing better than doing a project, let try to build your own AirBnB website

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Gustavo Bazan

I've been doing rails for about 10 years now, back in the days the poignant guide to ruby was a fun way to get familiar with the language. And for rails it's about having the official docs at hand and reading others people's code. Reading some of the most popular gems and how they solve common problems can give you an idea of the things you can do

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Brian Kephart

I can't believe I left out the poignant guide!

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Jeff Hall

I second Michael Hartl's book, and Rails 4 In Action is also good (although getting a little dated now).

As a second book, after you've done a tutorial or three and you're wondering "Now what?," I recommend Practicing Rails by Justin Weiss. Both Justin and Michael have been really responsive and they want to help you, so give those a try.

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Semicolon&Sons • Edited

Don't forget the latest contender: Semicolon&Sons

The focus is on production web-apps. Instead of toy examples, the screencasts are situated inside a live codebase with a decade of legacy, hundreds of thousands of monthly sessions, and tens of thousands of monthly revenue -- and all the complications that accompany all this.

They are certainly not beginner screencasts, but are there to help people fill in the gaps when they are responsible for a deployed piece of software (ESPECIALLY if they are indie-hackers).

Things like architecture, non-brittle integration testing, data integrity enforced at an SQL level, monitoring and responding to production issues, integrating JS without fad frameworks, auditing gems and JS dependencies, softer stuff like SEO for programmers, etc.

You can check out the kind of content we’ve got here: semicolonandsons.com/series/Inside...

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ananth vankipuram

Esp, vouch for Jack Kinsella's Screencasts/YT videos on SEO for Rails n00bs

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Jorge Chiavaro • Edited

You can take a look at this online course: edx.org/course/agile-development-u...
In addition to ruby and Ruby on Rails, you’ll learn agile development, TDD, design patterns and so on. I highly recommend this corse and the next one. I hope this can be useful to you.

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Charlie Strack

Udemy, youtube, railscasts, obsessive reading (The Bastards book of Ruby, The Well Grounded Rubyist, plus loads of online e-books depending on what I was attempting to achieve at the time). There are so so many tutorial videos that are excellent on youtube too. I also joined a bootcamp, which I can highly highly recommend - just for the shared experience of pairing with other people in the same boat as you!

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matt mcknight

Agile Web Development with Rails is the one I started with in 2005. Still kicking out the new editions. pragprog.com/book/rails51/agile-we... If you follow along and build the application in the tutorial, you will be productive.

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Rogier Nitschelm

This place seems like a good way to get into intermediate Rails and Ruby:

thoughtbot.com/upcase

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Yaroslav Shmarov • Edited

After you get to know the basics, this should be the next step for upskilling: Ruby on Rails 6: Learn 25+ gems and build a Startup MVP 2020