Ruby: The Last Eight Years | Hacker News Reader

Ruby: The Last Eight Years

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58 pointsr4um17 comments

That was nice to read. Ruby is new for me, so here's a question: is there some classy guide (like LYAH for those who start learning Haskell) for Ruby newbies?

I prefer my guides to be a little bit trashy

Jeez - I was just making a joke since the parent was asking for "classy" guides rather than "classic" guides.

Not perhaps what you're looking for but the whole style of fairly zany intro guides began with "Why's Poignant Guide" for Ruby.

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

LYAH was actually inspired by _why the lucky stiff's Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

The only problem with _why's book of course is that it's older and has examples that no longer work. That said though I found it a fun little read when I needed to get up to speed with some Ruby for a project recently.

I would suggest rubykoans, in addition to (even possibly instead of) a normal guide or book: http://rubykoans.com/

A lot of Ruby is about the ecosystem and tooling nowadays (like Java, ironically!) so https://howistart.org/posts/ruby/1 might be a useful starter as it really digs into that side of things, with the code part being mostly obvious in nature.

Depends on how you're a newbie!

New to coding - Chris Pine's Learn to Program is THE book. I like it more than Why's guide, or any website.

New to OO - Try Sandi Metz's Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby, this book should be your second ruby book, as it teaches you how to write good Ruby.

New to Rails - Try the Hartl tutorial or Agile Web Development with Rails

New to Command Line Apps - Build Awesome Command Line Applications in Ruby, it's an O'Reilly book I liked.

Advanced Ruby - Confident Ruby by Avdi Grimm, along with his Ruby Tapas screncasts.

What book would you suggest for someone who is "New to Ruby"? What if I want to learn Ruby without Rails?

If you have experience in another language, and once you've gotten the Ruby syntax loaded into your brain (e.g. procs, lambdas, if/unless as a modifier, case statements, define a class, how optional parens work) I can recommend two options:

1. The Pickaxe Book (Programming Ruby by PragDave). You can read the book itself, but one thing I love is that it explains the entire stdlib in an appendix. I learned a lot just by keeping it near the bathroom and flipping through that appendix a few times each day.

2. POODR by Sandi Metz (referenced above) is about OO but you will also get a sense of how to write non-web, pure Ruby applications in a general sense.

Try The Well-Grounded Rubyist. I appreciate that it focuses on the language, not the standard library.

http://www.manning.com/black3/

Chris Pine's Learn to Program! It's a great book that both introduces coding concepts and Ruby really well.

The best guide to Ruby that I've seen is "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide". http://ruby-doc.com/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

I would recommend Metaprogramming Ruby by Paolo Perrotta if you know how to program but are new to metaprogramming.

Great article, by a very experienced Ruby hacker. Wish he were as active in the community again, as he once was. Rumor says he is also looking into elixir these days :-).

It seems every Rubyist is looking into a variant of Ruby these days, expecially those which compile down to machine code, usually.

I don't see it as a bad thing... it can only improve the Ruby environment in the long run..

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