Vincent Voyer

Posted on Nov 19, 2019 • Updated on Jan 13, 2020

Best modern resources for learning Rails 6 and Ruby

#rails #books #learning #tutorials

Photo by Robert Bye

Ruby and Ruby On Rails books and tutorials are legion, but they are not always up to date nor complete. I did a lot of digging and reading to find the best ones and ranked them in order from standard to advanced material.

If you're eyeing Ruby on Rails and looking for a learning path to follow, this post is for you.

None of the links here are sponsored in any way. Not that I don't want to have sponsored links, I just don't know how to generate them.

🤘 Let's go.

Day one, morning: TryRuby

🔗 https://ruby.github.io/TryRuby/

This is a ~30 minutes interactive tutorial. It will get you trained on the essential Ruby data structures. I really enjoyed it. If you have experience in other programming languages this will be faster to follow.

Day one, afternoon: The official Getting Started from the Rails website

🔗 https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

It's a simple tutorial, but it can be a good way to endup your first day of learning Ruby and Rails.

Rest of the week Next two weeks: Learn Enough's Ruby on Rails tutorial

🔗 https://www.learnenough.com/ruby-on-rails-6th-edition

This must be, by far, one of the oldest non-official Ruby on Rails tutorial (2010). Since it's a paying one, I was hesitant (you know, 🆓 stuff!) but you should not. Its content is of amazing quality. It's not just a copy and paste tutorial, you really do learn a lot of fine details of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Highly recommended.

Update November 29, 2019: It took me longer than a week to finish this tutorial, but it was worth it, here's the final result:

✋ Stop learning and build

At this point, you can stop learning intensively and actually build stuff.

But in the future, you might want to learn more, to scale, to optimize, to refactor. When that's the case, I plan on reading:

The Ruby Style Guide
The Rails Style Guide
Build a SaaS App in Ruby on Rails 6
The Complete Guide To Rails Performance when you're ready/need to get web-scale®
The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Third Edition when you need and you're ready to dive deeper into Ruby
Agile Web Development with Rails 6 when you need and you're ready to dive deeper into Rails
Awesome Ruby
Awesome Rails
Secure Rails
Securing Sensitive Data In Rails
Production Rails
The Rails 6 way
Hix on Rails's tutorials

Any other recommendation? Add them in the comments. 🙏

Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed this post, share it for others to discover it:

Vincent Voyer

@vvoyer

📚 Modern resources for learning Rails 6 and Ruby, 2019 edition: dev.to/vvo/modern-res…

22:12 PM - 19 Nov 2019

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

Latest comments (9)

Yaroslav Shmarov • Nov 16 '20

That's actually a good list! I would also add:

hix.dev • Jan 12 '20

Hey Vincent!

That's a nice collection here, I didn't know Ankane's Secure Rails - good stuff!

We've recently started our series focusing solely on Ruby on Rails configuration tutorials.

I'd appreciate any feedback, and keep up the good work!

Vincent Voyer • Jan 13 '20

Thanks for the comment! I went through the tutorials, very well written and with lots of content, congrats!

I'll add your resource to the list, it's relevant.

K-Sato • Nov 20 '19

Neat!

Scott Simontis • Nov 20 '19

I'd recommend spending a lot of time with Ruby itself before adding Rails to the picture. Ruby is a super-powerful language, almost like C++ when it comes to the number of language features you have available to solve any particular problem (which can be a good thing and a bad thing).

I tried learning Rails before without a concrete understanding of Ruby, and I succeeded in making a site, but my code wasn't elegant and nothing I learned soaked in because I was constantly having to go look things up and didn't understand Ruby enough for them to click in my head. I've been learning Ruby the past few months without even touching Rails and I've I still feel like I've only scratched the surface!

Vincent Voyer • Nov 20 '19 • Edited

Thanks Scott! I guess experience differs for me here, using TryRuby and the Learn Enough Rails tutorial was sufficient for me to get enough Ruby to feel comfortable. I come from the JavaScript world also and actually the different language features and concept are similar, even if syntax differs.

I would maybe avoid spending months learning Ruby if your goal is to build a product, because it seems a very long time. But it depends on your needs.

Still, super important to learn Ruby first and then continue learning it yes.