Getting Started With Ruby on Rails: Resources (Paid and Free)
I have gone through all of my Ruby on Rails resources and have come up with a list of what I think are the best resources to get you started with your Ruby on Rails journey. This will be the first of a few lists about Ruby on Rails I will be posting over the next week or two. Following the getting started list will be a list on intermediate resources, advanced resources, and finally a list of some commonly plugins and blogs that I really think will help boost your understanding of Ruby on Rails. So with that, let’s get started!
Free Resources
- First you’ll probably want to get Ruby on Rails installed on your machine. To do this is quite simple and this website will help you along the way. If you are on a relatively new mac, you probably already have Rails installed and therefore just running the command ‘gem install rails’ from the terminal will get you the newest version of rails and all of it’s dependencies. More on this on the official Ruby on Rails website.
- Rolling With Ruby on Rails Part 1 and Part 2 – This is a slightly outdated tutorial as it was written in 2005, but it still serves as a great introduction to the language of ruby and the framework rails provides.
- Really Getting Started with Rails – Amy Hoy over at Slash7 has put together a great guide that not only covers the the basics of RoR, but also introduces the reader to the basic concepts of the Ruby scripting language.
- Getting Started With Ruby on Rails – The excellent A List Apart wrote an article not very long ago that shows the benefits of using RoR for a web project. It introduces the reader to the basics of ruby and many concepts of the rails MVC framework.
- Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OSX – Apple has written an article on getting started using ruby on rails with a fresh install of Mac OS X. It is a great tutorial that takes you through the creation of a basic RoR web application.
- Ruby on Rails from Scratch – Probably my favorite of all the free tutorials I have listed. This is a four part series of very visual tutorials for learning RoR. I know most people are visual learners, so this series is great for you. In fact, parts of the series are video tutorials. Definitely worth checking out.
- Rails Framework Documentation – This is the Rails API. Get familiar with it because it will become extremely useful the more you learn to love it.
