Instructional Guide to programming with Ruby and Rails
Revision date: January 25, 2007
Introductory Tutorials
Pre-requisites
- A desire to write programs and build web applications.
- A computer – Windows, Macintosh, and Linux are all equally good platforms
- A network connection – there is a tremendous amount of information available on the web
- Software: Installed version of Ruby, Rails, and tools for text editing and debugging. One very good approach is using an IDE (such as Eclipse), although many developers primarily used text edits (e.g. TextMate for the Macintosh wins the high praise of many.)
- Time to learn and to write programs and to improve those programs
Once you have gone through a couple of quick, free, easy tutorials, you'll have to assess if you're ready to get serious. If so, you'll find an extraordinarily good collection of well written books that cover the landscape. I believe a distinguishing aspect of this 'Ruby and Rails Revolution' is the quality and quantity of well-written, pedagogically sophisticated, educational materials to guide you through the start-up phases all the way to more advanced work. Given the choice of stumbling along or grabbing some good books as your guide, I would recommend the latter approach. I believe the following books will help speed you on your way:
Reference Materials as your Guides
Basic Reading / Reference:
- Agile Web Development with Rails, Second Edition, By Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson, With Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, Andreas Schwarz, Second Edition December 2006
- Programming Ruby, Second Edition The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, Second Edition, By Dave Thomas, With Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt, Second Edition October 2004 Pages: 864
Intermediate Techniques and Challenges:
- Ruby Cookbook, By Lucas Carlson, Leonard Richardson, First Edition July 2006, Pages: 906
- Rails Cookbook, By Rob Orsini, First Edition January 2007, Pages: 534
- Ajax on Rails, By Scott Raymond, First Edition January 2007, Pages: 350
- Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers, by David Black, Pages: 532
The Essence of Real Applications:
- Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, By Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, First Edition December 2005, Pages: 694
- Head First Design Patterns, By Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Freeman, Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates, First Edition October 2004, Pages: 676
- Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design A Brain Friendly Guide to OOA&D, By Brett McLaughlin, Gary Pollice, David West, First Edition November 2006, Pages: 634
Determined to be Database Driven?
- Learning MySQL, By Seyed M.M. "Saied" Tahaghoghi, Hugh E. Williams, First Edition, November 2006, Pages: 618
- MySQL Cookbook, Second Edition, By Paul DuBois, Second Edition November 2006, Pages: 975
- Managing & Using MySQL, Second Edition Open Source SQL Databases for Managing Information & Web Sites, By George Reese, Randy Jay Yarger, Tim King With Hugh E. Williams, Second Edition April 2002, Pages: 442
Ruby & Rails Start-up Tips
User Groups - great places to share what you're learning and learn more
Possible Future Topics
- Making the Switch to Ruby (from Java, Python …)
- Magical and Mystical Tools (Regular Expressions, Ajax …)
- History of Open Source, Ruby, and Rails
- OS Platforms – Linux/Ubuntu, Mac, Windows
- Cutting Edge – Software Design and Development
- Hardware Hacking – Performance Unlimited
Favorite Websites
Ruby on Rails
Web Services / Web Development Environment
Formatting and Producing Output
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) & GUI
Database (SQLite) Development
Books
Interesting Ruby Libraries
Side Topics of Interest
Steganography