Ask HN: Learning Ruby on Rails in 2022
Any advice on best way to learn RoR in 2022? Books, Courses etc I am not kidding, despite all the youtube tutorials & online guides, this one hit the nail. Follow everything in your pace, and ready everything thoroughly. Yeah! I've worked in some medium/large Rails shops and these are overlooked to a crazy degree. There's no best way, my friend. Hartl's tutorial was where I started, many years ago. I think he keeps it updated. The best way to learn web dev is to build the thing you want. You'll learn what you need as you go. This was my approach to learning Ruby on Rails when I joined a startup using it 2 years ago. This is also my standard approach learning anything new since I started programming. I would like to augment this advice with the very helpful but rarely mentioned step of actually reading through all the docs eventually and learning best practices from research on blog posts, open source projects, and other internet communities. This is especially important when learning a technology in the absence of a mentor/senior developer. In the past, I’ve been burned thinking I built up a serviceable knowledge through learning as I go on my own projects. This approach is a great way that falls in line with the fact that a lot of new technologies are still just the same old fundamentals, but it’s important to recognize that true skill in a specific technology requires that extra, quite laborious, step. I agree with you that building the thing you want is the best way to learn. However, for an "opinionated" framework like Rails, it's really best if you read through the official (brief, and IMHO excellent) guides so you can get a feel for the basic opinions baked into Rails. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ Otherwise you're going to be fighting the conventions the entire way. I agree. The best questions will come when you look to answer your own passionate questions to build a project you’ve dreamt. You can't go wrong following this advice. Please do. I started with Sinatra first, the goal is to actually learn Ruby. Then i go with Ruby on Rails, with help of some good tutorials. The point is, get accquainted with git, rails convention, testing and deployment. Skip the Javascript part as most as possible first. The important thing on this journey, is you'll eventually love Ruby, let it drive your fun, curiosity and happiness along the way. Good luck! Agree. Learning Ruby first is really valuable. Frameworks like Rails extend Ruby rather seamlessly. If you're entirely new to both Ruby and Rails, that's a looooooooooooooooot. If one must absolutely must learn everything in a day or two, one can probably just look at the official Rails Guides. That is sufficient to write a Hello World or simple CRUD app, and Ruby is simple+friendly enough not to pose a challenge. However, getting familiar with Ruby outside of Rails is highly recommended. It's fast and easy to learn. As a bonus IMHO you don't need the more complex bits (metaprogramming, etc) for typical Rails app development. This was also my path. I highly recommend it, you'll know more Ruby than most Rails folks if you go down this path. Start following the blog example Ruby on Rails tutorial on the Ruby and rails guides but at the same time try to learn the Ruby language more deeply than rails books introduce. There are few good Ruby books but I the most complete resource to learn Ruby deeply that I have found are the few excellent courses on it on pluralsight, especially the two courses by Alex Korban. Unfortunately pluralsight is a paid service but you could sign up temporarily for a few months to learn what you need.
Also there are a bunch of really good Ruby language presentations on Ruby central on youtube If video content is your thing, I've really enjoyed GoRails. I haven't personally gone through it, but I've heard great things about their starting rails course, and Chris is a great teacher. Good luck! +1 for GoRails along w/ Chris' Hatchbox[0] Heroku alternative. I remember doing a basic Ruby's Code Academy course and the Cloning famous apps based on another Udemy course. Cloning apps is one of better approaches for this.