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I have just bought a Ruby on Rails book, but I am going to learn Ruby as much as possible through the internet first.
The first thing I need to know is, what is Ruby and what do I need to run it?
Is it likely to be installed on my Linux/Apache server or will I need to have them install it? Is it even a web based language or is it like Java or C, any help, advice, tips all gratefully received, especially if you can point me to a good tutorial to start me off.
I would take jaunt over to the Ruby website - http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ and begin there. Personally, I found this site to be a good introduction to Ruby - http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/Ruby_Essentials. There is a site where you can run the code without even installing it - http://tryruby.org/. I think this should allow you to get to know the language well enough to decide if you want to go any further.
what is Ruby
A programming language.
and what do I need to run it?
A computer that has Ruby installed.
I'd start with Ruby-lang.org (including the tutorial in the link).
Beyond that, IMO another excellent activity to learn Ruby is the Ruby Koans, which help you learn idiomatic ruby through fixing failed unit tests.
Book-wise, for Rails I had good luck with Head First Rails. I'm currently chewing through The Ruby Way, which has been great for learning more idiomatic Ruby.
If your interest is in learning Ruby on Rails, and are a total beginner, you would do well to start with Michael Hartl's http://railstutorial.org/
It is the best one-stop resource for a newbie; and it is a much efficient way to learn rails than to go about learning stuff on the internet.
In addition to teaching Rails framework, the book teaches the reader about the tools essential to existence in the Rails Community, such as Git, GitHub, Heroku, RubyGems, Test Driven Development with RSpec. There is adequate treatment of relevant topics required for becoming a Rails developer - HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the relevant parts of Ruby language. And there are suggestions for further reading to advance the skills in each of these.
The book begins with a chapter with easy to follow steps for installing all relevant components on various OSes, including Linux.
When I learned Ruby and Rails I started with Pragmatic Programmers' Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails (1st edition) and worked my way back into Ruby from there. If I had it to do over I would have picked up Programming Ruby (also from Pragmatic Programmers) at the same time--as it was I picked up bits and pieces of Ruby as I went, and didn't really sit down and learn Ruby for about a year, even though I was creating Rails apps for production.
These days I think Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial site, already mentioned, is the best way to go.
In addition, Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book is an overlooked but good introduction to the Ruby language. It's available as a free PDF.
Learning Ruby the Hardway is a good book to start with
http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/book/
Related
I'm going to learn Ruby to use Ruby on Rails in future to look for new horizons. I've read a lot about Ruby, but... I doesn't found any real applications that are built with Ruby? For Mac I've found only CLI apps.
Does anyone have use cases for pure (and popular) Ruby applications?
Try googling for "ruby code for applications"
I found this:
http://www.fincher.org/tips/Languages/Ruby/
If your ultimate goal is Rails applications, I would learn that at the same time (that search is easy too. Many folks start with the famous hartl tutorials and Ryan Bates Railscasts), particularly to get experience with the miriad conventions that you need to know to write good rails apps. If you got good at ruby first you could end up writing a lot of code in rails apps... that could be written for you via rails conventions and external gems.
I would advise you to learn both stacks simultaneously. The ruby you need for bread and butter work on Rails is not that complicated. Furthermore Rails is very centered on the framework itself. Unless you need to write your own GEMs (plugins) you will not dive too deeply into the ruby part.
A good start for Rails are the courses mentioned here:
http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts
For specialized knowledge I can only emphasize Ryan's Railscasts listed there.
For books I recommend the Galileo Computing "Ruby on Rails" books. For Rails 2 there is a free version online. For 3.x, which you prpbably want to use, you have to buy it.
I would recomend Ruby Best Practices, good guide how to build applications.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I have learnt java. I can write in C/C++. Recently i have been developing web applications in java. I was planning to learn ruby. Are there any prerequisites for ruby that i don't have.
In terms of knowledge? No, not really. You'll just need to be prepared for when Ruby does things differently to C-type languages. You'll probably find your workflow changes too – Ruby doesn't have a compile stepº
This slide deck looks pretty helpful.
APIDock is an invaluable resource for learning standard libraries…
Get yourself a decent book (or try a neat online tutorial), and dive right in.
What do you want to do?
If you want to build web apps, rails is the obvious and most popular choice, but there are other, lighter options (like Sinatra) available.
If you're interested in using it to build desktop apps, then Shoes is a good cross-platform option to explore.
If you're using Linux or OSX (and you probably should be), you should use RVM to keep things tidy, and using Bundler with your projects will protect you from gem versioning hell on any platform.
º Technically, it could, but none of the major distributions compile Ruby to anything…
I haven't learned any computer language before save Basic and similar vendorscript trash. I have been developing no web applications at all. I cannot write in C/C++. Yet it took me less than a year to learn Ruby, start using Emacs, Git, Heroku, Bundler, MongoDB and all those things developers are supposed to use. I'm doing it for my job (writing a simulator in Ruby). You have nothing to fear, as long as you are a mathematician.
Have a look at these sites:
ruby learning
Ruby docs
Unfortunately, you already missed the most important prerequisite to learn Ruby: not having learned Java ;-)
This may seem a bit inflammatory, but at least in my experience with learning Ruby myself as well as what I have observed from friends, it seems indeed to be harder to learn Ruby if you have learned Java beforehand than if you haven't learned to program at all. In my personal quest to learn Ruby, the hardest thing was unlearning everything I learned from Java.
Smalltalk (or even better Self and Newspeak) are much better languages to learn before learning Ruby, as are Scheme and Haskell.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I know nothing about ruby.
Do you know some beginner video tutorials for ruby? And also tutorials for Ruby Enterprise development?
There is a fun tutorial for ruby : Rails for Zombies
Learning Rails for the first time should be fun, and Rails for Zombies allows you to get your feet wet without having to worry about configuration. You'll watch five videos, each followed by exercises where you'll be programming Rails in your browser.
In addition, there a lot of casts about rails on railscasts.
It's not video, but it's a great resource that won't waste your time, "The Well-Grounded Rubyist Covering Ruby 1.9 David A. Black": http://www.manning.com/black2/
I've worked through the text using a MacBook, rvm, git, textmate, and iTerm, which are all good supporting tools IMHO.
rvm : https://rvm.io
git: http://git-scm.com/
textmate: http://macromates.com/
iTerm: http://iterm.sourceforge.net/
If you are ultimately aiming to try Rails as well, Michael Hartl's "Ruby on Rails Tutorial"
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ is free on-line and is highly recommended. This includes a lot of fundamental Ruby teaching. There are accompanying screencasts that are $$$, but they are well reviewed.
Took me a while to stumble upon the excellent work of Black and Hartl, so I thought I'd share them here even though they are not video. They are the two highest yield sources that I have personally used for learning Ruby and they are likely to save you time.
hth,
Perry
There are some video tutorials on all the basics of the Ruby language over at http://manwithcode.com, but from his last post it seems that the site is probably dead. However the videos are still worth a watch, especially since they're free.
There are on www.tekpub.com, but for $$$. You can get monthly subscription for about 30$ I think.
I recommend this course http://net.tutsplus.com/sessions/ruby-for-newbies/
Also good course Ruby Essential Training but for money
Not sure if there are any beginner video tutorials for ruby. If you are a total newbie, I would recommend picking up a copy of Chris Pine's book Learn to Program http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/
If you want to learn Rails, Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ is the best resource for any beginner who wants to learn Rails - in my opinion. It takes the reader through everything required to become a decent web-developer. The book is available for free on-line. There are 15 hours of screencasts as well to guide one through the tutorial. At $95, the PDF/screencast bundle is a steal!
I suppose this is two very closely related questions:
Everyone says to start with Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, and I can't stand that book; what's another good starting point for an experienced programmer that has a more serious tone?
If I'm not the sort of person who appreciates _why, should I skip Ruby because the community will not be to my taste?
I'm currently rolling through Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. So far I think the concepts are well-defined by the authors, and the examples provided help clarify any misunderstandings. The book is available for free online or you can order a copy:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/
Update: More current version of book (Thanks bgporter)
http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9
The only problem with the online version is that it is a little outdated. I don't know Ruby that well yet so I can't say how much of the book is still valid in all cases, but the examples have worked for me so far when I run them. Note that the book available for purchase is up to date. It's hard to beat free, so be sure to check this guide out.
That being said, I don't think you should skip out on Ruby just yet. I've had a blast learning the language so far, and I'm looking forward to doing some full-fledged web development with Rails soon. At the very least give the language a chance; I think you'll find it a joy to work with.
I bought a lot of books learning ruby, the Well Grounded Rubyist was hands down the best.
And while we aren't really a community of _whys, we are a community of people who appreciate creativity and cleverness in code. If you are the sort of person who thinks there should only be one way to do something, and that way should be the clearest and most straight forward possible, python is probably for you. If you are the person who likes to push the language as far as it will go to create interesting and clever APIs, ruby is probably for you.
The Ruby Programming Language.
Programming Ruby would be my choice. It's also known as the Pickaxe book because of the cover:
It's a great introduction to Ruby. Why they still have the huge API reference in it in this day and age escapes me, though. It makes it thick as a brick, which is its only fault.
You can also find it online, although I think it's the first edition, which is well dated: http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/. The third edition is the one in print now, it was updated just months ago and covers Ruby 1.9.2, which is the latest version of Ruby at this time.
I don't particularly like _why either. He created some great libraries, but I can't stand the Poignant guide, nor any of the talks he made. You don't have to like him, or be like him to belong in the Ruby community.
Ruby Koans are great for learning those small things that make Ruby unique.
It's basically set of excercises that show you how things work. Each excercise is in form of a failing test, and you have to make sure it passes. And they're fun! :)
If you're going to do them all, I also suggest enabling autotest, so you won't have to run them manualy. This article explains how.
Not everyone says start with Why's book, for instance, me.
Here's a quick list of my on-disk Ruby books and references. You can search for their individual titles on the interwebs. Some are commercial, and some are free. I linked the ones that are part of an app's documentation that I saved as PDFs so I'd have them on my laptop.
Agile Web Development with Rails
Programming Ruby
Ruby Best Practices
Sequel cheatsheet
Sinatra Book
The Ruby Cookbook
The Ruby Programming Language
The Ruby Way
The Well Grounded Rubyist
Why's book is worthy, but reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson trying to write a programming book, complete with Ralph Steadman drawings, which really disturbs me.
Also, don't overlook using ri, which is the on-disk reference to Ruby's libraries and gems. Also, the core library and standard library docs are really useful.
I was in your position this summer. Why was not for me, but I did find an excellent online resource: http://railstutorial.org/. It is actually for learning Ruby on Rails, but you can use it to learn Ruby as well. I'm not very experienced but I believe you can be part of the Ruby community without appreciating Why :-).
http://railsforzombies.org/ is a nice one , although it is not a book
Chris Pine's Learn to Program It's very straightforward. I started learning right away. It was very encouraging.
My colleague has written an excellent post summarizing starting points, books to read and paths to follow when learning ruby at http://www.jasimabasheer.com/posts/meta_introduction_to_ruby.html
I'd recommend taking a look at it, it has a wealth of information.
To add more info to the answers above, not really a book to learn ruby but a some companion resources for the learning process:
Ruby Language Quick Ref
Essential Ruby Refcard
I am intermediate in java but as one of the company requirements they are looking for JAVA+RUBY programming language..
Can anybody help how to get started with Ruby I need to get it done in next one month so that I can crack the interview of the company...
I wanna know how does Ruby work like compiler, is it platform independent or how does byte code generated..
I must be able to write the small level programs in Ruby..
Like in java First I need to download JDK den getting started with programs..
How about Ruby what all I need to install in my computer..
Thanks..
To Ruby From Java
To Ruby From Other Languages
Download Ruby
The Pickaxe book
Why's guide
Kind of surprised no one has mentioned JRuby yet.
One of its strengths is the ability to natively call Java classes, so you can use a lot of the frameworks from Java that you're already familiar with.
Downloading the Ruby Koans is another great way to learn
http://github.com/edgecase/ruby_koans
Pragrog books are always good:
http://pragprog.com/titles/fr_j2r/from-java-to-ruby
Start here:
http://tryruby.org/
Once you do the 15 minute walk-through, go here:
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide
To Ruby from Java:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/to-ruby-from-java/
That is the official site for Ruby and will be able to point you to language downloads and other resources.
How about the Ruby language web site: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
Also, I would advise you not to try and come across as a ruby expert in the interview after only playing with it for a month. It's better to err on the side of honesty, because a good interviewer will be able to tell when you are faking it... or worse, it will show when you start working.
Ruby is a cool language... have fun!