Ask HN: Best Ruby On Rails resources for experienced developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best Ruby On Rails resources for experienced developer?

8 pointsLasher9 comments

Overwhelming number of "learn RoR" resources out there. Hoping some of the experts on HN can recommend good resources for an experienced C/C++/Java developer to learn Ruby on Rails. Paid is fine if the value is there. Thanks!

View on HN

When beginning learning RoR, look through Rails for Zombies (http://railsforzombies.org) and Try Ruby (http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/0) to get a feel of the new language. It's quite different from C/C++/Java.

You'll get better working out and experimenting with things on your own, but Hartl's book serves as a great beginner's guide (while being comprehensive).

I think "The Rails Way" by Obie Fernandez works as a good reference book after you get more experienced as well.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rails-Way-Obie-Fernandez/dp/032144...

That's bout all(:

The canonical resource is the Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book. It's aimed primarily at programmers, and it's free online.

The other place to look for books is Pragmatic Programmers ( http://pragprog.com/titles ) who do the Agile Web Development with Rails book which is usually fairly up to date, along with some other in depth titles.

A subscription to Railscasts pro ( http://railscasts.com/ ) is also well worth the cost.

I completely agree with the Railscasts mention -- I use it and asciicasts (http://asciicasts.com/) which is the text version quite often.

The pro membership pays for itself back right away as you have access to the whole collection of pro and revised episodes he has released to this point.

The docs for ruby and rails both are really helpful too. http://corelib.rubyonrails.org/ http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/

The Hartl tutorial is absolutely amazing. I still go back to it all the time. I was all Java before I picked up Rails and this book answered all of my questions.

I don't have a specific resource to add, but I want to point out that Rails has a rather steep learning curve. Once you get over the "aha!" hump, though, it's really productive.

Edit: Nevermind, here's a resource you should bookmark (even if it is obvious): http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

I still reference pieces of it, and I've been using Rails for six years or so now.

> Rails has a rather steep learning curve.

I can't agree more. I came in thinking it was going to be fairly easy to pick up, but it seems like I spend most of my time just looking up how to do things "the Rails way" (not that that's a bad thing persay, but you definitely feel like you're doing nothing sometimes).

Anyways, I found Agile Web Development with Rails (4th Edition):

http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-r...

to be fairly useful if you don't mind buying a book. Plus, the ebook gets updated fairly frequently with erratas and stuff, as per usual with the PragProg team.

Railscasts.com

Railstutorial.org

The Rails 3 Way

Rails 3 Antipatterns

guides.rubyonrails.org

It's probably best to start with the absolute basics, just to make sure you don't miss anything. Even if you just skim through them.

Good question; I'm very interested in RoR, but coming from a more static language/framework like CakePHP and ASP.Net MVC3, I'm confused on how to use it correctly.

Let's so someone enlightens us. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com