31–37 of 37 posts
Would you think this book and screencasts would work for my skill level or should I use another book to learn more about Ruby?
Beginner here, I'm a mechanical engineer with very little experience with programming. I tried to follow the book this week but found it little bit difficult to follow. Question: Should I go learn the basics of Ruby first or should I power through hoping to learn everything along the way? If you think that I should learn the basics first, would you recommend learnrubythehardway or something else? Thanks in advance!
I started learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails a few months ago. I've found it much easier to learn the basics of Ruby before diving into Rails. I started with reading Learn to Program by Chris Pines. The book is aimed at someone new to programming. Does a great explaining programming and Ruby.
This does look interesting. Can't quite figure out if it would suit me. I'm interested in learning Rails but I haven't done any Ruby before. I do a lot of C#, ASP.NET MVC, RavenDB, MySQL/SQL server and AppHarbor, so I understand MVC and web development environment from the .NET side. Would you think this book and screencasts would work for my skill level or should I use another book to learn more about Ruby?
Although as a person with substantial programming experience, I would recommend you to have a look at Chapter 4 first. The first few chapters deal with code examples that are not meant to be understood (at that point), but knowing the "Ruby way" will help you to figure out most of it. The book also is more holistic about Web Development; Rails, although being the main focus, isn't all that it covers. Version Control (GIT) and Deployment are explored as well. Also, the author having beginners in mind, goes through the terminal stuff a bit slower.
You might find yourself skimming few pages along the way, but the book does an extremely good job at getting you to the point where you can and know what you want to do next.
You could add something like this:
Ruby with Cygwin (Windows)
Another option on Windows is install Ruby under Cygwin. If you are already using Cygwin then installing RVM and Ruby is done the same way you would do it on Linux/OSX. If you do go the Cygwin route then throughout the rest of the book just follow the Linux/OSX examples. Here are the steps:
First, make sure you have the following Cygwin packages installed: git, readline, wget, patch, make, gcc, libsqlite3-devel, libxml2-devel, libxslt-devel.
Then install RVM: curl -L get.rvm.io | bash
Then just follow the steps listed in the next section to install Ruby.
Purchased and read back to back the first edition of the book. Very glad to see an updated edition, it hasn't been that long, but a lot has changed in the meantime! Michael, I was looking through the online version of the book and I couldn't find any indication that I was reading the 2nd edition. I apologize if I simply missed it, otherwise I think it might be worthwhile mentioning in the preface that what we're look…
The Rails version number is highlighted in the right-hand margin (3.2 indicating the 2nd edition). Also, to make the choice easy, the 2nd edition is now the default.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Rails version number is highlighted in the right-hand margin (3.2 indicating the 2nd edition). Also, to make the choice easy, the 2nd edition is now the default.
It took me about 30 min today to figure out why when I started Chapter 5 your Application Controller had different content than mine (missing the blueprint, etc). Would you recommend the 2nd edition although I am halfway through the first edition?
I am reading the book on safaribooksonline and commit to github. ( https://github.com/alder101/rails-tutorial ) The book is great. Thank you Michael. I think that experience of reading such "Learn by example" books would be even better if: * Each chapter or section are issues on github. * Examples are commits, associated with the issue. * Extensive use of labels as book index.