pcrawfor.comLearning Rails knowing where to look
Last post I was talking about my thoughts on the Rails learning curve, but I didn’t give you much help on where to go to actually help yourself along that curve.
One great thing about rails and ruby is that there are lots of great resources out there to help you learn. I’d like to go over a few of the best resources I’ve seen and used and to point you in the right direction.
Books
The two most well known books are Agile Web Development for Rails and the pickaxe (Programming Ruby) which provide great reference and grounding in rails and ruby respectively.
There is one book I came across that gives I think the most complete overview of ruby in the context of using it for rails development. Ruby for Rails by David Black provides a great introduction to ruby and gives an amazing amount of great information. Including a chapter on meta-programming ruby that is worth the book alone in my view. The most important part about this book is that it makes an effort to frame ruby in the context of rails which is very useful for people just getting started with rails.
As a general reference book the Pragmatic Programmers are an amazing resource and have a wide selection of development books and pdf’s covering not only ruby and rails but other languages and development practices in general.
There are of course a lot of other books out there that can be great for ruby development and I have named only what I consider to be the must have’s, to that list I’d add The Ruby Way – this is a reference book on almost every topic I could think of related to ruby with examples and sample code for just about everything. A good one to have on the shelf for problem solving when working in ruby.
Blogs
There are a lot of rails and ruby related blogs out there but some of the best one’s I’ve come across are:- Nuby on Rails – Geoffrey Grosenbach provides useful tools and tutorials, and is the man behind the wonderful peepcode screencasts
- The Rails Way – Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski provide refactoring and style guidance for development in rails…the rails way, this can be a good way to pick up on best practices and see how other people are solving common problems. Not to mention some great insight into how to approach solving problems with rails.
- The Buck Blogs here – Jamis Buck has lots of great articles going way back on all sorts of topics…check it out.
- LoudThinking – DHH himself, a good one to keep an eye on.
- Brainspl.at – Ezra Zygmuntowicz blog on rails and ruby related work, Ezra is known as a deployment expert.
- Jay Fields Thoughts – Jay Field’s consistently provides great information especially ruby oriented stuff (not necessarily just rails) and is a great resource for picking up on advanced ruby.
- Err the Blog – this blog provides some very useful tutorials and in a style that can be very entertaining, this is a must read and be sure to dig through the archives.
- Ryan’s Scraps – Ryan provides great peeks at what is coming down the pipe in rails edge along with some useful rails tutorials/tips
- PragDave – Dave Thomas one of the men behind the Pragmatic Programmers provides insights on many different subjects often related to rails.
There are also a couple of good aggregated sites on my feed reader
If you have questions about a specific problem you can use the almighty google and often you’ll find someone else has already written a tutorial on how to figure it out.
Screencasts
Screencasts are something that I hadn’t seen a lot of before I got involved in ruby and they are one of the best resources for rails related material.- RailsCasts are free short screencasts by Ryan Davis that cover a wide range of topics and give short sweet examples of features and techniques in rails.
- Peepcode are longer in depth screencasts on topics such as Capistrano and RJS they do cost a little bit of money, but they are great value and for getting started on a new area of rails development they often provide a good way to get oriented.
Mailing Lists
The final resource I’ll mention today is the mailing lists, there are mailing lists/google groups for rails, ruby, and a number of sub-topics in the world of rails (‘Ruby on Rails meets the Business world’ for instance).
If you are looking to ask a question or see if someone else has already had a similar problem to one you are facing this can be a great resource. Personally I receive abridged summaries from many of theses lists so I can keep up with what is going on out there.
These resources are a great place to start, and I highly recommend you take advantage of all of them, it’s amazing how much useful and helpful information there is on rails and on ruby.
And remember give back to the community, if you can help someone else out then do so.
Paul