Great, you’ve decided Rails is worth learning, but you are completely new to it. How should you go about it?
Well, I looked back at the path I took, left out the bits that weren’t useful, and re-ordered things the way I think they would have been most useful.
Step 1 – Feel the buzz. You need the wow factor. The rails community has a ‘Show don’t tell’ mentality, so check out these cool and quick screencasts: http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts
Excited yet?
<yoda>You will be… You will be…</yoda>
Step 2 –> Next up: The view from 30,000 feet:
- If you are reading this, you may already have this view. But, just in case, here is a good introduction to Ruby On Rails. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/10/13/what_is_rails.html good overview
Step 3 – Get Amongst It!
Time to make an actual app! You’ll need to set some things up first though. I’m on Windows, so if you are using another environment, this won’t be too much help. You’ll find that a large portion of Rails developers are Mac users, but I think the number of Windows Rails developers will continue to grow. I’ll post more on that later.
Anyway, let’s get moving. You can find a good first tutorial here: http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/tutorial/index.html It is a modified version of another great tutorial, but is set to fit Instant Rails. It is slightly out of date so see some notes below. Instant Rails (http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl ) is a super awesome one click and you’re done Ruby on rails environment, complete with MySql. Two Notes:
- The tutorial mentions MySQL-Front (no longer available). Get HeidiSQL instead: http://www.heidisql.com/
- The tutorial also talks about webrick server. Instead, mongrel will be running, but that shouldn’t affect the tutorial at all.
Step 4 – Editor
You may also an editor. I’ve tried RoRad, RadRails, and Aptana (which actually bought and integrated RadRails). Aptana is easily the best though it’s constant updates occasionally break things for me, and some of the configuration options aren’t intuitive. You can get Aptana here: http://www.aptana.com/download_rails_rdt.php (follow the instructions on the right)
Step 5 – More In Depth:
So now you should understand the high level view of rails, and have made your first app. Make a more fully featured app by following the 4 Days on Rails tutorial here:
http://rails.homelinux.org/ A good second tutorial
The next step is to buy, read, and follow the book Agile Web Development On Rails http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/title/rails/ This is a great resource and definitely worth the money.
I’ll post more about other resources soon, but that should be enough to get people started.
