New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist. • Hacker News Board

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#11

Post by betageek » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:38 PM UTC

why-el wrote: post #4

I would like to get some advice from experienced Ruby hackers. Currently I am picking up Ruby through rails, which I am assuming is fairly common. I want to know the downsides to this and what people did to supplement their ruby knowledge beyond Rails. I eventually would like to write my own gems, contribute to open source, and so forth. I am absolutely not satisfied with just consuming Rails.

I'd highly recommend The Well Grounded Rubyist by David Black http://www.manning.com/black2/ if you want a good intro to Ruby, I found it a much better intro than the Pickaxe

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#12

Post by rjsamson » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:43 PM UTC

tferris wrote: post #10

rjsamson wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best advice I can give is get to know Ruby well - don't just focus on Rails in the beginning. Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen is a great read and will give you a deeper understanding if you've got the basics down. Also, the PragProg book Metaprogramming in Ruby is a great intro to metaprogramming.

I can't recommend Eloquent Ruby at all: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803016

Really? Eloquent Ruby is one of the best Ruby books I've read - Russ Olsen is one of the best and most well respected technical writers out there. Design Patterns in Ruby is also excellent.

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#13

Post by rjsamson » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:46 PM UTC

why-el wrote: post #4

I would like to get some advice from experienced Ruby hackers. Currently I am picking up Ruby through rails, which I am assuming is fairly common. I want to know the downsides to this and what people did to supplement their ruby knowledge beyond Rails. I eventually would like to write my own gems, contribute to open source, and so forth. I am absolutely not satisfied with just consuming Rails.

I've also heard good things about the PragProg Ruby course - its $199 but is supposed to be excellent, though I have no direct personal experience with the course.

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#14

Post by tferris » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:46 PM UTC

rjsamson wrote: post #12

tferris wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't recommend Eloquent Ruby at all: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803016

Really? Eloquent Ruby is one of the best Ruby books I've read - Russ Olsen is one of the best and most well respected technical writers out there. Design Patterns in Ruby is also excellent.

I had this discussion already (see the link). Maybe it's a matter of taste but I think this book has some severe weaknesses and thus, I wouldn't recommend it.

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#15

Post by alinajaf » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:47 PM UTC

betageek wrote: post #11

why-el wrote: post #4

I would like to get some advice from experienced Ruby hackers. Currently I am picking up Ruby through rails, which I am assuming is fairly common. I want to know the downsides to this and what people did to supplement their ruby knowledge beyond Rails. I eventually would like to write my own gems, contribute to open source, and so forth. I am absolutely not satisfied with just consuming Rails.

I'd highly recommend The Well Grounded Rubyist by David Black http://www.manning.com/black2/ if you want a good intro to Ruby, I found it a much better intro than the Pickaxe

His previous book Ruby for Rails is just as good an introduction to Ruby.

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#16

Post by rjsamson » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:51 PM UTC

tseabrooks wrote: post #9

I'm in the middle of picking up Ruby primarily because there was a GitHub project I wanted to fork and modify for my purposes that happened to be written in Ruby.The biggest problem I found is that the Ruby (or maybe the Rails?) community by and large provides shit instructions on how to get something running. I checked out a handful of projects and they all said things like, "Just deploy the normal what you deploy a…

I've actually found the documentation for projects in the Ruby community, on the whole, to be quite excellent. That being said, I can sympathize with the confusion getting things deployed, if only because there are so many options. The best bet for a beginning, IMHO, is to give Heroku a try when getting your first app deployed - they have some really excellent documentation.

As a beginner, trying to deploying a rails app to production from scratch is likely to drive you a bit crazy.

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#17

Post by hkarthik » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:53 PM UTC

why-el wrote: post #4

I would like to get some advice from experienced Ruby hackers. Currently I am picking up Ruby through rails, which I am assuming is fairly common. I want to know the downsides to this and what people did to supplement their ruby knowledge beyond Rails. I eventually would like to write my own gems, contribute to open source, and so forth. I am absolutely not satisfied with just consuming Rails.

I'd recommend reading Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen. It's a great after-Rails intro to Ruby and uses a lot of specific examples from the framework to highlight how Ruby features make some of the magic happen in Rails.

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#18

Post by Toshio » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:55 PM UTC

tseabrooks wrote: post #9

I'm in the middle of picking up Ruby primarily because there was a GitHub project I wanted to fork and modify for my purposes that happened to be written in Ruby.The biggest problem I found is that the Ruby (or maybe the Rails?) community by and large provides shit instructions on how to get something running. I checked out a handful of projects and they all said things like, "Just deploy the normal what you deploy a…

One Rails project that provides pretty thorough installation instructions is this: https://github.com/dserban/censormenot

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#19

Post by nascro » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:57 PM UTC

tseabrooks wrote: post #9

I'm in the middle of picking up Ruby primarily because there was a GitHub project I wanted to fork and modify for my purposes that happened to be written in Ruby.The biggest problem I found is that the Ruby (or maybe the Rails?) community by and large provides shit instructions on how to get something running. I checked out a handful of projects and they all said things like, "Just deploy the normal what you deploy a…

Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial addresses this right away. The first chapter is called From Zero to Deploy, where he demonstrates how to set up a Ruby/Rails programming environment and deploy rails apps to Github and Heroku.

Re: New to Ruby? Tips for the new Rubyist.

#20

Post by michaelbuckbee » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 2:58 PM UTC

alinajaf wrote: post #15

betageek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd highly recommend The Well Grounded Rubyist by David Black http://www.manning.com/black2/ if you want a good intro to Ruby, I found it a much better intro than the Pickaxe

His previous book Ruby for Rails is just as good an introduction to Ruby.

I found Ruby for Rails very helpful when I was getting started. It helped separate Rails "magic" from the underlying language aspects in a way that most other books did not.