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Comment by mtran | Hacker News Reader

Loads of articles about non-technical founders needing to learn to code. Short of pursuing a CS degree, and after Tryruby.org and Codeschool.com, what do you recommend?

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Lynda.com has some good training. I'm finding their Ruby on Rails 3 Essential Training to be very easy to follow. I have been programming in PHP for the last 3 years, so I do have some experience with programming, but I think this training would be just fine for beginners as well. It is $25 a month for a basic account and you might find that a little high, but I think it's worth it for the amount of training that you have access to.

I will check this out. I've been amazed at the affordability of available resources and think $25 a month is very reasonable. It's also great to find so many people who are generous with their time and expertise and willing to offer some direction. I love this place! Thanks a bunch for sharing your resources!

Yeah HN is definitely a great community. It's not a bunch of people being snobby and rude like you would find with traditional forums. I've only been a member of HN for about a week, but I'm addicted because of the positive attitudes that the majority of the members have.

By the way, I'm also loving RoR. I went through some training on it a couple of years ago, but I was already set on PHP and didn't take it seriously. Now that I'm actually learning RoR I can't believe I wasted my time with PHP all of these years. I'm not going to say I hate PHP, but RoR makes things so much easier in comparison.

Thanks -that's great information (about RoR) - Hearing from people w/all different coding backgrounds and levels of expertise is a huge asset for us right now. There are so many camps and HN is definitely helping us sort it out and learn to ask the right questions. A friend just told me today that some people have concerns about Ruby's scalability for complex and high traffic apps and sites (which is what we intend to build) - but others swear that's what it's best for... would love to hear your take.

I'm definitely not an expert, but I have been looking at the scalability of RoR as well. Twitter was built with RoR and you can kind of take that as a good thing and a bad thing. They had some trouble in the beginning, but from what I can tell they really didn't consider the scalability when they built it. I think if you plan to have to scale then you should be fine.

A couple of things to look at: http://www.buildingwebapps.com/articles/6419-can-rails-scale...

http://rubyonrails.org/applications

Fantastic, thanks! This is right on time for some of the discussions we are having and I really appreciate your taking the time to point these out! Would love to hear if you run in to any more/ anything different on this subject. Thanks a million!

Since you're interested in Ruby, try learning rails. I suggest reading through Ruby Guides' Getting Started[1] and then going through the Rails Tutorial[2], where you make a Twitter clone.

  [1] Ruby Guides - http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
  [2] Rails Tutorial - http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

Great! I'll check these out and share these with my teammates. Thanks for passing them on!

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