As it stands now, I'm a Java and C# developer. The more and more I look at Ruby on Rails, the more I really want to learn it.
What have you found to be the best route to learn RoR? Would it be easier to develop on Windows, or should I just run a virtual machine with Linux?
Is there an IDE that can match the robustness of Visual Studio? Any programs to develop that give a good overhead of what to do? Any good books?
Seriously, any tips/tricks/rants would be awesome.
I've been moving from C# in my professional career to looking at Ruby and RoR in my personal life, and I've found linux to be slightly more appealing personally for development. Particularly now that I've started using git, the implementation is cleaner on linux.
Currently I'm dual booting and getting closer to running Ubuntu full time. I'm using gedit with various plugins for the development environment. And as of late 2010, I'm making the push to use Vim for development, even over Textmate on OS X.
A large amount of the Rails developers are using (gasp) Macs, which has actually got me thinking in that direction.
Although I haven't tried it, Ruby in Steel gives you a Ruby IDE inside the Visual Studio world, and IronRuby is the .NET flavor of Ruby, if you're interested.
As far as books are concerned, the Programming Ruby (also known as the Pickaxe) book from the Pragmatic Programmers is the de-facto for learning Ruby. I bit the bullet and purchased that book and Agile Web Development with Rails; both books have been excellent.
Peepcode screencasts and PDF books have also been great for getting started; at $9 per screencast it's hard to go wrong. I actually bought a 5-pack.
Also check out the following:
I've burned through the backlog of Rails and Rails Envy podcasts in the past month and they have provided wonderful insight into lots of topics, even regarding software development in general.
Beware, the rails world is a massively frustrating mess of outdated and inconsistent documentation and examples. It is maybe one of the fastest moving and most faddish development communities there is. By the time you learn something it will already have changed. Even the books are not consistent in which version of rails they are talking about. Documentation by blogging! enough said.
I currently do RoR on windows. My advice is to avoid windows if you can. Lots of things don't work and the rails community really really doesn't care about you. The move to Git has really messed me up since it doesn't work very well on windows. A lot of gems will fail because of this (Heroku looks like a cool tool - too bad for me it can't handle window's Git setup). Capistrano is out. It goes on and annoyingly on.
Plus, in the back of your mind, you always wonder when something doesn't work "Is it a rails/windows problem?" I am not sure this is solved by using linux because linux brings its own hassles like constantly having to upgrade all those different dependencies, etc...If that's the kind of thing you enjoy it might be an okay choice for you. Those days of enjoying system fiddling are behind me and I just want to get on with doing my work. I am planning on installing ubuntu on a home machine just so i can get familiar with things like capistrano so maybe my opinion will change.
I'd highly suggest if you are going to do rails dev for any amount of time you seriously consider getting a Mac. If you value your time and sanity it will pay for itself almost instantly. Depending on how you value your time 10 hours of debugging windows/linux setup problems and you have spend as much as a Mac costs anyway.
Rails is a joy compared to what it replaces but it is a bit of a pain in that its proponents skip right past a lot of the boring but important stuff like documentation, compatibility issues and community building. It is way more powerful than other frameworks like Django but I sometimes look over at the Django documentation and community and sigh like a guy with a wild sexy girlfriend looking at his friend's plain but sane and stable wife. But then rails adds a feature and I go "Ohhh shiny!"
IMO the Rails Screencasts are better than the Peepcode screencasts. RubyPlus also has screencasts, mind you, they are bit rough around the edges. BuildingWebApps has a free online course that starts doing screencasts halfway through.
Path of least resistance:
I wrote a post called "Getting Started With Rails -- What I wish I knew" that many people found helpful.
The basics:
The online tutorials are decent but scattered. Invest $30 in a book for a more comprehensive understanding.
I really enjoy RubyMine from Jetbrains. It seems like a very full featured IDE something I miss from many of the other alternatives out there. Also for a simple env I enjoy e the text editor. Plain and simple.
As you, I'm a java/C# developer trying to learn more Ruby On Rails.
I'm taking the free online course Ruby on Rails Programming with Passion, is a good introductory course, check it out.
We are using NetBeans as IDE (win/mac/linux/solaris), if you are used to Eclipse or Visual Studio, there is a good chance you will like it.
I came from a Java background to Ruby to. I found this tutorial helpful http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/to-ruby-from-java/. When it comes to learning rails I cannot say how much I use script\console. It allows you to play with the code and learn how to do things that you are not sure about.
The only book I ever bought was Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with-rails-third-edition. It was quite useful and provided a good overview of the Rails framework. In addition to that I regular watch Railscasts(http://railscasts.com), which is a great screen casting blog that covers all kinds of Rails topics.
I personally prefer using Linux (because git works better). But, I have also used windows and besides git I do not think the OS choice will impact your programming.
I use netbeans for my IDE and occasionally vim (with the rails plugin). I like netbeans but, I find that it can still be a little flaky when it comes to the Rails support (not all the features work all the time).
This looks like a great resource for people like me who are coming from PHP to RoR
http://railsforphp.com/ There's also a book Rails for PHP Developers
The ubber source for anything Rails is http://www.rubyonrails.org/ if they don't have it on the site you probably don't need it.
A quick cookbook is Ruby on Rails: Up and Running you can get it from O'Rielly or search Google for a on-line version. They walk you though the conventions of Rails and use Instant Rails which is ok.
A better Rails book "Agile Web Development with Rails" This is the soups to nuts of Rails. It walks you though downloading and setting up Rails, Gems, everything.
If you want are a Java 'guy' and want a transition book O'Reilly has "Rails for Java Developers" http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780977616695/?CMP=AFC-ak_book&ATT=Rails+for+Java+Developers
Oh I almost forgot. Here are a few more Ruby screencast resources:
SD Ruby - the have a bunch of videos online - I found their Rest talks SD9 and SD10 to be among the best of the intros. Other rest talks assume you know everything. These ones are very introductory and to the point.
Obie Fernandez on InfoQ - Restful Rails. I've also read his Rails Way book and found it informative but really long winded and meandering and the quality is a bit inconsistent. I learned a lot from this book but felt it was a bit punishing to have to read through the repetition and irrelevant stuff to get to the good bits.
Netbeans is a nice hand holding IDE that can teach you a lot of language tricks if you have the patience to wait for its tooltips (it is a painfully slow IDE even on a really fast machine) and you can use the IDE to graphically browse through the available generators and stuff like that. Get the latest builds and you even have Rspec test running built in.
Bort is a prebuilt base app with a lot of the standard plugins already plugged in. If you download it and play with it and figure out how it is setup you are about halfway to creating your own full featured apps.
My suggestion is just to start - pick a small project that you would generally use to learn an MVC-style language (i.e. something with a database, maybe some basic workflow), and then as you need to learn a concept, use one (or both!) of
Agile Web Development with Rails or The Rails Way
to learn about how it works, and then try it.
The problems with Agile Web Development are that it's outdated, and that the scenario runs on too long for you really to want to build it once; The Rails Way can be hard to follow as it bounces from reference to learning, but when it's good, it's better than Agile Web Development.
But overall they're both good books, and they're both good for learning, but neither of them provide an "education" path that you'll want to follow. So I read a few chapters of the former (enough to get the basic concepts and learn how to bootstrap the first app - there are some online articles that help with this as well) and then just got started, and then every few days I read about something new or I use the books to understand something.
One more thing: both books are much more Rails books than they are Ruby books, and if you're going to write clean code, it's worth spending a day learning Ruby syntax as early as possible. Why's Guide to Ruby is a good one, there are others as well.
I bought the book "Simply Rails 2" by Patrick Lenz.
This book is a great introduction to Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
As for my ruby installation and db, I used Cygwin.
It comes with PostgreSQL, ruby and svn.
I like PostgreSQL because I come from an Oracle
background so it feels more comfortable than MySQL.
The other utility I found really useful was pgAdmin
for accessing the PostgreSQL databases.
The first thing I needed to do was to get gems installed.
I got the gems tar file from rubyforge
wget "http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz"
Once I had gems setup, I installed
rails
ruby-postgres
postgres
rack
I also needed an issue tracking system so I installed redmine.
wget "http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz"
I found that using a UNIX-like environment (Cygwin) was
preferable in my case because many of the tutorials were
taylored for OS X or Linux.
The text editor I use is Textpad. I'm looking for an alternative. I think that vim with the rails plugin might work nicely.
I think the screencasts and short books from Peepcode are really good. They have screencasts to get you started and have some as you get more advanced.
There is a site called Softies on Rails that is written by a couple of ex-.NET developers that may be of some use. They have a book called Rails for .NET Developers coming out in the next few months...
I started out on a Windows box using the RadRails plugin for Eclipse and the RubyWeaver extension for Dreamweaver (back during the 1.x days of Rails). Since then I have moved to a Mac running TextMate and haven't thought of going back.
As for books, I started with The Ruby Way and Agile Web Development with Rails. It definately helps to build a background in Ruby as you start to make your way into Rails development.
Definately watch the Railscast series by Ryan Bates.
I have found "The Rails Way" by Obie Fernandez excellent and often found myself referring to it when Agile Web Development with Rails didn't seem to go far enough. Obie Fernandez has a decent blog too.
Wait a couple of months for Learning Rails by Simon St. Laurent, Edd Dumbill to come out in November. That series of books is stupendous, and this book will cover the latest version of Rails.
Once you get your environment up and running, this is helpful in giving you a basic app that users can log into.
Restful Authentication with all the bells and whistles: http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=14216&p=1
I'm currently learning RoR, here's what I've done so far: 1. Read, and followed, SitePoint's "Simply Rails 2.2" 2. Read, and followed, Oreilly's "Rails, Up and Running" 2nd edition.
Those two books are very instructive, and take the same approach in different styles; the second book is a little more aggressive, which is good if you have some RoR knowledge.
As posted above, be extremely careful when reading resources, there are A LOT of outdated videos and articles.
Railscasts shmailcasts ...
1. Think of some type app that you'd like to develop it.
2. Take 20 minutes to napkin out some user flows
3. Read the first couple of chapters of "Agile Web Development with Rails" with your project in mind
4. Install Netbeans and rails on your windows or mac machine. Either is just the same.
5. Develop your app
6. Consult the bajillion and one online references as you develop.
Ruby: I used Learn to program (in a weekend), Ruby Visual QuickStart (believe it or not this QS book was "off the hook" excellent). This took about a week.
Rails: I just went through Learn Rails in one "aggressive" week. Definitely feel I have the nuts and bolts. It's 2009 which I deemed important!
Now I plan to combine a more advanced book with a real project.
IDE: VIM with rails plugin is great if you're a vim addict. Otherwise, try any suggested above.
Of course railscast, etc., are useful for most up to date stuff.
My steps was:
* Agile development with Rails (book)
* Railscasts - very useful, always learn something new.
* And of course the RoR API
Read all the guides at guides.rails.info, starting with Getting Started with Rails They are well written, well organized, and up to date.
An excellent source for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails is at http://www.teachmetocode.com. There are screencasts that cover the basics of Rails, along with a 6-part series on how to create a Twitter clone with Ruby on Rails.
I actually have an article about getting started with rails that should help. The only part of your question it doesn't cover is the OS. Mac is the dominant player here, believe it or not! But I use Ubuntu happily. There are gedit plugins that get you very close to TextMate - in fact, I like gedit better.
If you're on a windows machine and can use linux, that's definitely a better way to go. Rails on Windows has a lot of issues.
I learnt Ruby with the help of Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book. It's an excellent free-to-download introduction to Ruby with lots of examples, which I'd 100% recommend.
I have got up to speed with Ruby on Rails fairly quickly via this free online course which is currently being offered by UC Berkeley - Software as a Service - Engineering Long Lasting Software with instruction by Armando Fox and David Patterson. I can't speak highly enough of this course... it really was a privilege to learn Rails from these guys. And there is an active community on the course forums if you run into difficulty along the way. The first offering of the online course has now finished (as of 25 March, 2012) - the next time it will be run will be sometime in September of 2012.
It assumes you are a fairly competent developer and gets you started on ruby in the second week, then Rails runs from the third week up to the end of the course (five weeks). Your assignments are marked by an auto-grader. You get provided with a pre-built Ubuntu VM image with everything you need for development pre-installed on it (e.g. Ruby, Rails, Rake, Gems, RSPec, Cucumber, etc). All you have to do is start up the VM inside the (free) VirtualBox software which runs on MacOSX, Windows and Linux.
There is a recommended text book for the course ... here ... but you may be able to get by looking at the lectures and screencasts online.