<story><title>Learning Ruby and Rails, where would you start?</title><url>http://ontwik.com/ruby/learning-ruby-and-rails-where-would-you-start/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>andymoe</author><text>If you have done some web development before (maybe python, maybe php, maybe ASP 1.0) go read the getting started guides and get rolling. It&apos;s a big framework and there is a lot there but if this not your first rodeo it&apos;s not going to take long to get it. You know what MVC is and rails is just anther (good) web framework with some nice code generation to start you off fast. Oh and that ORM can be handy too!&lt;p&gt;If you are new to Ruby or web dev I would suggest you first start with Sinatra (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sinatrarb.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.sinatrarb.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;That will give you an idea of what basic basic web dev looks like in ruby without the overhead of a huge framework to take in.&lt;p&gt;After you have a simple hello world running with Sinatra then see about adding an external gem. (Maybe the &apos;shotgun&apos; gem mentioned on the Sinatra site) then learn about bundler &lt;a href=&quot;http://gembundler.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://gembundler.com&lt;/a&gt; and get Sinatra running with that setup. Look at the template languages (erb, haml) and play with those. When you find yourself playing with middleware then maybe look at rails and see what it has to offer. At this point you will already have a felling for how everything fits together with a rack based web app (Sinatra and Rails both use Rack) at a little lower level and I think you will have a better experience with rails and be more productive because of it.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Submissions that have links to articles with questions marks in the title are annoying. Thought it was an ask HN at first.</text></comment>
<story><title>Learning Ruby and Rails, where would you start?</title><url>http://ontwik.com/ruby/learning-ruby-and-rails-where-would-you-start/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sradnidge</author><text>In all honesty, I would forget about Rails unless you have a really, _really_ compelling reason to pursue it. Rails is such a big framework, you could easily spend as much time learning it (Rails) as you would learning Ruby itself. I would recommend starting with Sinatra and Padrino for Ruby based web frameworks, you&apos;ll likely find you never need anything more unless you get a job at a Rails shop.&lt;p&gt;In terms of Ruby itself, having picked it up myself only fairly recently I would recommend the following:&lt;p&gt;- unless you plan on maintaining someone elses code, jump straight into Ruby 1.9.&lt;p&gt;- hang out in the IRC channels, #ruby-lang and #sinatra on Freenode. The community is awesome and really helpful.&lt;p&gt;- the Sinatra video from Peepcode is really good&lt;p&gt;- for books, I would recommend &quot;Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby&quot; (ISBN 978-1849511063), &quot;Beginning Ruby from Novice to Professional, 2nd Ed&quot; (ISBN 978-1430223634) and of course the current version of the Pickaxe book (google it :)&lt;p&gt;- check out thechangelog.com regularly if you don&apos;t already&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s about it, good luck with it - I&apos;ve found it fun so far and am currently developing my first web app on top of Sinatra which i hope to launch in a month or so!</text></comment>