Start learning from Ruby or directly from Rails.

rubyonrails-talk
1

I want to build a small GUI application that makes sense and not just a Hello World application. I tried wxRuby, FxRuby and other libraries but all seem to complicate things.

How to learn basics of Ruby and make learning interesting? How you all started with Ruby? Whether Ruby first or Rails first?

2

I personally started with Ruby first. I like the books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. (pragprog.com)

Douglas Lovell www.wbreeze.com

3

> How to learn basics of Ruby and make learning interesting? How you all > started with Ruby? Whether Ruby first or Rails first? > I personally started with Ruby first. I like the books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. (pragprog.com)

Ruby first. Rails is a great tool for quickly generating crud web interfaces and dealing with databases (and so much more). But, what it outputs is Ruby code, and if you understand ruby, you will understand much of the magic that is Rails.

Better yet, you'll be in a position to modify and extend the code that Rails generates to better suit the task at hand and gain a better understanding of things like 'method_missing' which is responsible for much of the magic behind the Rails curtain.

Feel free to check out http://RubyTalkTips.com. It's an open source website for Ruby showing what I have considered to be some of the best ruby language tips over the past few years from the Ruby Talk mailing list.

-- Steve Downie

4

My personal view is, and what actually I did is learning rails first. I think its a good way of starting, because you can create a basic rails application with no time and that make you feel comfortable and confidence. But then start learning how this rails works, and start learning ruby…

Then sooner you will realise rails is not magic it pure ruby

So my advice (my personal)

1 - start developing a basic application in rails get your self some thing working, be happy be confident

2 - start learning ruby

 you will understand the magic behind rails

;D

cheers

sameera

5

I started with Rails. Though I had some strong foundations in OOP and programming principles in general when diving into RoR.

And I found out that I agree with the idea that you don’t need pure Ruby knowledge beforehand to learn Rails fast and effectively. Pure ruby will come into play when you need to code more advanced stuff. You will have decent knowledge of Ruby if you are good at Rails. It just comes naturally, because not everything that is needed FOR Rails app is written IN RoR - sometimes, it’s just pure ruby.

IMO, just pick one of the better beginner/tutorial books that advertise “Ruby on rails for beginners”, and keep checking the API documentation for both Ruby and RoR when you stumble upon something you don’t understand. This way you will learn what you need to do things at hand fast, and the knowledge will build up eventually, for both RoR and Ruby.

I advocate this way also because Ruby is far more general than RoR. RoR is pretty much about Web or anything involving browser, while pure Ruby can be used as sysadmin language of choice. I think you see where I am going with this: it’s better to learn the stuff that you are going to work with/on (i.e. RoR is far higher priority than Ruby when starting out).

6

To rephrase, when you learn RoR from a book aimed at beginners, you will get the (basic) Ruby knowledge necessary to make your Rails app work. While if you start with Ruby, you will not have any idea of MVC, views, templates, controllers, models etc. The focus will be a lot different than if you had been learning from Rails book. I think it’s clear why starting with Rails would be more effective: you learn stuff that you need to advance further in Rails quicker, while at the same time you are free to deeper your knowledge about a Symbol further on your own, with the help of google or whatever.

And what if you miss how Enumerable#each_with_index works, you just check that on the internet, and carry on building your shopping cart :wink:

7

> How to learn basics of Ruby and make learning interesting? How you all > started with Ruby? Whether Ruby first or Rails first? > I personally started with Ruby first. I like the books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. (pragprog.com)

Ruby first. Rails is a great tool for quickly generating crud web interfaces and dealing with databases (and so much more). But, what it outputs is Ruby code, and if you understand ruby, you will understand much of the magic that is Rails.

Better yet, you'll be in a position to modify and extend the code that Rails generates to better suit the task at hand and gain a better understanding of things like 'method_missing' which is responsible for much of the magic behind the Rails curtain.

Feel free to check out http://RubyTalkTips.com. It's an open source website for Ruby showing what I have considered to be some of the best ruby language tips over the past few years from the Ruby Talk mailing list.

-- Steve Downie

8

@Steve:

Learning Ruby alone is difficult. As I said, if I can't quickly design a GUI and make a small application with sense, the rest of the journey is boring.

I'll check RubyTalkTips.com

........... Rohit.

9

Hi ,

My learning curve in ruby and rails is in progressing.

  1. First learn Ruby basic things like iterations, looping , class and objects and then
  2. Start jump into the Rails.

Ruby my favorite book is Programming Ruby by “Dave Thomas” which is currently following really good one. for Rails I have searched lot but finally decided http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ is best and Dave Thomas book “Agile Web development with rails”

If you have anything interest pls post

Thanks, Senthil Srinivasan