This is my first post here and generally the first post I’m making on the web regarding Ruby or Rails. I come from PHP and especially Joomla. I can’t say I have done some “serious” development till now. I’ve developed small projects but never something ‘big’. But these last months I’m very productive and I have a nice idea that I want to develop. So I’ve searched a lot and decided to go with Ruby & RoR for getting into serious web development. I’ve started learning Ruby 3 days ago using “Beginning Ruby - From Novice to Professional” by Cooper and I think I’m doing pretty fine till now (just finished the first part).
As I’m eager to learn to develop, I’m constantly thinking about when it will be a good time to start diving into Rails too. I mean, sometimes I can be patient so I don’t want to hurt my Ruby knowledge for rushing too soon into Rails. On the other hand, I also don’t wanna be too slow on this, cause if I’m to learn Ruby, then when I finish this book I could go on another one (Matz’s book) so I will have a solid understanding of all the aspects of the language before starting with Rails, but this could take me a lot of time. I just want to do it the “right” way but as Rubyists believe: “there is more than one way to do it”
When would you suggest me to start with Rails? I already have basic knowledge of MVC architecture and classes + objects in Ruby.
I'd finish the book you're working through, then dive into Rails - if
you want to follow another book after, I'd recommend "Agile Web
Development With Rails", or find another tutorial/primer that takes
you through the framework idioms.
Have some fun; make some mistakes; ask some questions here; throw away
some stinky code, and start again after
The best way to learn any new language or framework is to apply it a real world problem. Start with any project, it can be something you wanted to do since a long time or maybe even try to port some website you’ve done in PHP to rails. That way you will have an idea of what needs to be done and you can start by asking what do i need to learn get this feature done. This way you are seeing yourself build something real as you are learning.
I have the same "problem". Actually, I have some challenges. (i)
Getting better with my english because I'm very bad. (ii) And
develope a system that I did for a English School and offer this
system like a SaaS model for another schools. Something like basecamp
but very specific. So, I have a long way =/
As other have suggested there is no time like the present. On common pitfall when trying to follow one of the books or tutorials to learn ROR is that ROR has changed significantly from version to version. Make sure that you load up the version of ROR that your book/tutorial is based on. Once you get some understanding of ROR you can probably move up to whatever version you think you should use but many people have asked a lot of questions and had a lot of confusion because they had a book based on ROR 2.x and they had loaded up the latest ROR which is 3.x.
