Ask HN: How should I get started with Ruby & Rails? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How should I get started with Ruby & Rails?

2 pointsstinky6133 comments

I've decided to finally learn Ruby. As the majority of my coding is for the web, I'm also looking to start working with Rails; however, I'm getting more and more flustered.

I have a basic Dreamhost account as well as an iMac running Apache/Rails/SVN/et al. On both servers I've put a CHMOD 755 Hello World test.rb file that will only run properly in my iMac's cgi-bin. My Dreamhost account doesn't have a cgi-bin that I'm aware off, and attempts to use .htaccess 'AddHandler cgi-script .rb' have failed.

What's more, I'm just not sure how to get started with Rails once I have everything running smoothly. Should I be bothering with Rails 2.3 or should I be "looking to the future" by learning Rails 3? There are an overwhelming number of tutorials--are there any that you would recommend above others?

I've been banging my head on my keyboard trying every idea and googling every question, but I'm at the point where my morale is dipping. Can anyone help?

You're starting at a tricky time. Rails 2.3 is still a great, stable platform and should be sticking around for quite some time.

Rails 3 does have many improvements, but it's still a "beta" in every sense of the word as many of the plugins don't work yet, or require many modifications to work.

I still think just about the best book/introduction to Rails is the Pragmatic Programmer book: http://pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with... - They don't yet cover Rails 3 yet, but in the meantime you could fill in the gaps with weblog posts and the like. If you get a solid grip on 2.3, you should have no problem adjusting to 3.0 once it becomes final.

Enable Passenger (mod_rails) on your Dreamhost account, then you can just upload Rails applications (or other Rack apps like Sinatra) to a directory and they will run:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Passenger

I would skip CGI if your goal is to learn a framework like Rails. If you want to write a simple one-file web app in Ruby, check out Sinatra. But if you have some existing CGI scripts that you want to run, you can add the +ExecCGI option as described in http://wiki.dreamhost.com/CGI

I followed http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html with moderate success. I'm a PHP programmer by trade, and that guide was easy enough for me to understand. As far as 2.3 vs 3.0, I don't know enough about RoR to weigh in.

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