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RailsCasts gets recommended to beginners a lot but every time I go there I'm kind of overwhelmed and have no idea where to start. The archives go back to 2007 so starting at the beginning seems likely to cover outdated subjects now. On the front page I see Draper, Spork, Sorcery, Foreman, Pry... none of this means much to me.

Any suggestions on how to attack this for a relative newbie to rails?

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I don't think Railscasts is a great introduction to Rails, but certainly a resource that beginners can use. What I did was to work my way through the first parts of "Agile Web Development with Rails" to understand the structure of rails, then just try to build stuff.

Whenever I had a question or felt somebody should have automated whatever I was doing, I would search Railscasts. I needed PDF generation, so I would search for PDF and compare my options.

When you have some experience with current Rails (say, 3.1), actively following new Railscasts is interesting to see what changed in 3.2, 3.3, 4.0, ...

railstutorial.org should come first. Then once you've cracked that, Railscasts will make more sense.

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