Steps to learn Ruby on Rails

I have pretty sucessfully taught myself Ruby on Rails from scratch with no real help from any one resource or book – in this post I will show you in some steps on how to learn the basics of Ruby on Rails, as well as some of the more detailed and difficult concepts to grasp.

In this post I will assume that you have already programmed in an interpreted or compiled language – C++, Java, Perl, Python are all perfect starts to a programming career.

Make sure you read all of this article before you begin, so you can see how your Rails skills will develop.

Start hacking

This is how all good programmers begin: with a weekend of time and an old fashioned hack-a-thon. I personally started with building a simple recipe app with collections of recipes in according to ingredients etc… 

• Install Ruby, Rails and Gems and get them working
• If you’re on Windows, you need a Linux virtual machine to do your development in. You’ll have A LOT of problems with Rails’ incompatibilities with Windows. Just do it, trust me!
• Make the simple ‘Hello World’ app.
• Hack away.

It is up to you this stage however.

Buy a few decent books

It’s all good me saying “Just get stuck in”, but I did need a lot of physical textual help with my learning curve of Ruby on Rails more complex areas. Not all the books that I bought were helpful or even in date, but there was a few that I found were invaluable to my learning.

Book one: Advanced Rails Recipes

Book two: RailsSpace

Book three: Rails Recipes

Subscribe to Railscasts

Ryan Bates presents a weekly video podcast in all areas of Rails. The later episodes tend toward more advanced areas of Rails, but if you get all of the episodes, you will find it difficult to get stuck with development in Rails.
www.railscasts.com