I'd personally be wary of many of the RoR tutorials you'll find online: none of the ones I used did a good job of explaining rails at the conceptual level: you'll end up with a rails app from the tutorial, but limited understanding of what you did and why.
My opinion is that one should begin with a Rails-specific book or tutorial and not feel the need to learn Ruby first. Much of rails code is specific to rails and, while you'll want to master Ruby eventually, you'll get enough from the Rails books.
Re:What is the best RoR book for beginners? Best online reso...
by jamongkad on Thursday April 19, 2007 @02:18PM
(#14701)
I second the thought on getting Agile Web Development with Rails. Best damn book I've ever bought concerning Rails. It is true that there is code specific for Rails(which kinda peeves me from my comfortable Ruby shell) but I highly recommend you learn Ruby first just to get the feel of programming in it. I must say coming from Java(ugh) programming is Ruby is such a pleasure. As long as you can think idiomatically then you're pretty much set!
Re:What is the best RoR book for beginners? Best online reso...
by martin on Thursday April 19, 2007 @03:36PM
(#14738)
"Ruby for Rails" by David A. Black is a good choice if you're new to Ruby as well as Rails. It spends a lot of time on Ruby fundamentals and only brings in the Rails stuff after having explained the necessary bits of the language so that it actually makes sense. I read the Agile book first, and as a Ruby newbie, it gave me only a very vague understanding of the language. R4R did a much better job of that.
Re:What is the best RoR book for beginners? Best online reso...
by rjb on Thursday April 19, 2007 @03:43PM
(#14743)
I have to second this. "Ruby for Rails", I feel, is a great resource for learning not only the Ruby language, but how to program with it. It really did not need the Rails section. I've only flipped through "Beginning Ruby" (apress), but that looks like a good Ruby book too.
DHH wrote it.
Obviously Agile Web Development with Rails is the bible of RoR books: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails2/
I'd personally be wary of many of the RoR tutorials you'll find online: none of the ones I used did a good job of explaining rails at the conceptual level: you'll end up with a rails app from the tutorial, but limited understanding of what you did and why.
Updated:
This page has a good selection of relevant books: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-and-Rails-Books-the-essential
My opinion is that one should begin with a Rails-specific book or tutorial and not feel the need to learn Ruby first. Much of rails code is specific to rails and, while you'll want to master Ruby eventually, you'll get enough from the Rails books.
List of 12 very good tutorials.
Rolling On Rails from OnLamp is a very quick and useful tutorial found here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html
This is the easiest and fastest way to get started: http://tryruby.hobix.com/
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/12/14/revisiting-ruby-on-rails-revisited.html
It's nearly 2 years more recent and up-to-date with Rails changes.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rubyrails/