How to become effective and professional in Rails?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Dear Group,

I know that this kind of question may sound not very good to you. But I just wanted to ask you that what is the best way to become perfectly effective and professional with good knowledge in rails.

I’m a software developer with almost 2.5-3 years of experience. a TDD, BDD and craftsmanship enthusiast. For the past year I’ve been hacking some stuff in Ruby and for the past 6 months I’ve been reading about rails and practicing on it. Not full time but I spent a fair amount of time on this. I’ve read Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl and wrote the application completely myself too. I also made some changes to it according to best practices of OO and separation of concerns, etc. for faster tests, more flexibility and maintainability, etc.

I’m currently reading Rails 3 in Action by Ryan Bigg and Yehuda Katz and making some changes to that application too for the same reasons.

I’ve been doing some other kinds of practice and readings on rails development too (including watching some railscasts by Ryan Bates etc.)

I just wanted to ask you guys what should I do for becoming really effective and professional in rails development with great knowledge in that area?

I really appreciate your helps and advice on this. Thanks in advance for your guidance. Best Regards

2

Hi Sam, I am also in almost similar situation. I am about to finish Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. I have plans to read "Well Grounded Rubyist" for Ruby and "The Rails Way" for Rails. Also have plans to watch railscasts.

Apart from that I have joined free course "Software Engineering for Software as a Service" by coursera.org. This course teaches the engineering fundamentals for long-lived software using the highly-productive Agile development method for Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails.

I request group members to suggest us how to proceed further and become a good rails developer.

Thanks Mukesh Kumar

3

http://astonj.com/tech/best-way-to-learn-ruby-rails/

Have fun! :slight_smile:

4

Thanks a lot guys, I really appreciate your responses.

Tutorials can say good things about popular gems and some common practices in rails development, etc.

And I think one of the things that we should do is trying to not to make the mistakes that already exist in rails projects. In most of the rails projects that I’ve seen there’s no good OO design and mixing responsibilities is a common thing. Fat models and slow unit-tests are bad ideas which can be easily found in rails projects. We should strive for better separation of concerns and SOLID design in our application.

These things can make good differences in the apps we write.

Best Regards

5

Hi Sam,

I also have same question in mind wat you have asked.

I have decided to follow below:

  1. Join community and solve other problems.
  2. Join twitter follow other developer and rails experts
  3. Finally I have decided to do some worth-fully project.

And you have said that you have knowledge on TDD and BDD . Can you suggest me where I can start.

Thanks, Senthil

6

Hi thil,

That worth-fully project is a great idea and I’m really trying to find something to do

and I’ll also be happy to participate on a project too!

if you wanna start on TDD and BDD in general and you meant language&framework-agnostic, for TDD

I suggest you to read this great excerpt of James Shore Art of Agile book on TDD which can be found here → http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/test_driven_development.html

for the idea and the concept and also you can read about enormous benefits of TDD from this post by

Uncle Bob → http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.TheThreeRulesOfTdd and these are good starting

points about the idea of TDD and its benefits and also you can read this wonderful book by Kent Beck called

TDD by Example (I recommend you try to write those codes in that book yourself and not just reading them

and move between the test and production code in short cycles etc.)

for TDD in rails in the Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl he develops the whole application using TDD

approach with RSpec.

For BDD you can search and find tons of articles by Dan North, Liz Keogh, Matt Wynne on this idea in general.

also the Rails in Action book by Ryan Bigg & Yehuda Katz use this approach for developing the application in it

using cucumber and RSpec. and you also can find great ideas in “The RSpec Book” about BDD in general and also

specific to rails. and for a good introduction and checking the surface of this whole thing you can

watch this nice screencast by Ryan Bates about beginning with cucumber in rails → http://railscasts.com/episodes/155-beginning-with-cucumber

Hope that helps.

Good Luck

Best Regards