Intended Audience

This is a guide to assist people who:

1. never used rails
2. have some experience

I’m not going to cover anything technical, just give some suggestions that I think made it easier for me to learn rails.

You may want to bookmark:

• Rails API – rtfm
• Ruby Doc
• Rails Forum – the forum for help
• The Rails Way – some nice articles
• Ruby Corner – think ruby
• Railscasts – the best rails tips you can get
• Peepcode – $9 each for a full length video
• Rspec – Behaviour Driver Development
• Raaum’s Rails Reader – Another great rails guide

“I’m limited, but together were unlimited” (Wicked)

Get anybody

Working with someone else, even if they don’t know rails really helps. Its great to have someone to bounce ideas off of or have a second preceptive. When I started teaching my friend Tye Rails he asked questions about things I’d never bother trying to do. In our second learning session we already began extending the rails trunk with a plugin. I didn’t think for another six months I’d ever be mucking with the original source.

A good deed is sometimes rewarded

Many times I’ll go out to help other people on the IRC and sometimes in return they’ll offer to put the time into help me with my rails problems.

Find them in your area

Check out Working with Rails and find people in your area. I messaged everyone I knew and met them at coffee shops. Its feels uplifting to have others around you doing the same thing.

Go where the help is

Here are places that you might want to frequently visit to ask for help.

railsforum.com

For lengthy questions

Ruby on Rails irc group

For quick answers ask someone in real time. To start chatting get one of the following apps:

• Chatzilla (Windows/Mac)
• Colloquy (Mac)

Mailing Lists

For lengthy questions. Nabble has mailing list archives that you can browse like forums eg. rspec users mailing list. A great mailing list to join if you’re trying to fix an html bug or can’t get your div’s to float well is the wsg mailing list.

You can Learn Rails and not know Ruby

Its strange but you can learn rails and not really understand ruby. I jumped into rails and didn’t start looking at ruby 6 months later. Its okay to neglect learning it in depth at the beginning but really do come back and get into ruby hacking. Otherwise you may only know how to use rails and not extend it. If your still confused I’d recommend watching Why Camping Matters?

If you have the money…

When I began using Rails I was on a Windows XP machine. I didn’t know how to install ruby or rails and I had no idea how to work with server’s like apache. I faked it and installed Locomotive on a portable hard-drive. I thought macs we’re awful machines but I saw all these rails tutorials were on a mac.

My first thought was why should I waste a bunch of money when I have a perfectly good windows computer. I challenged my negative thinking to use the mac and after 2 months I was able to get more done in rails than I ever could in windows in the past six months.

The reason why is because of the amazing design of the mac, it reduced the clutter and excessive steps to preform tasks. It just worked. With the powerful text editor, TextMate and the terminal nearby I could do anything. Best of all, I was able to follow along with all the rails tutorials out there. Convention(Mac) over Configuration (Windows)

If you have the available funds I’d recommending getting a mac and textmate. You’ll grumble for the first two months, but then you’ll be really happy from then on after.

Also I’d recommend purchasing peepcode videos. They are worth the $9. Even if you already think you know how to do it. You can watch it to validate that you know what your doing.

Prove that your code is good

Once you think your getting good at Rails. Get on BDD or at least TDD. You basically write code to test the behavior. Also the thought process that comes along with doing BDD will help you know what to do next. Before BDD I used to think what am I suppose to do next? and I wasted deciding what to do, or taking the wrong approach.

Mantras to remember

• Convention over Configuration
• Underdo your Competition
• Now is better than latter
• Clarity over Cleverness

Look Forward for Revisions

I’ll be coming back to revise this lesson. I wanted to just get this up here for the new people learning rails and something is better than nothing.