As with all noobie learners, one of the best ways to learn about Ruby and Rails is to read sites on the net.  This has it’s good sides and bad sides.  On the good side, there’s a vast amount of information out there, free for the taking.  People are willing to throw out information about coding skills, projects, give you access to their source code…. all for free.  On the bad side, it’s the wild west.  There’s scads of information, mostly unsorted, and a lot of the people sharing it are on the edge of the technology, and it’s very easy to get lost in the latest-and-greatest and completely miss learning the simple and fundamental lessons.

To quote a game programming book I read once long ago: “First make it work, then make it work fast.”  It’s fairly easy to move that to the ruby world.  “First write a rails app, then write one with the latest wiz-bang plugin.”  OK, maybe it doesn’t work that well

Here’s a list of some of the sites I keep in my RSS reader for keeping up to date…

Ruby

• Ruby Best Practices – Just found this one, a nice collection of Ruby skills and “proper” ways to do it.
• Ruby Learning Blog
• Ruby Inside – Daily news and links.
• On Ruby

Ruby on Rails

• Rails API – A web based collection of the Rails API.  See this site for a great tip on how to integrate this into your local search on a mac if you use Launchbar.
• Rails Inside
• Zed Shaw – A very notable member of the Rails community, and creator of Mongrel.
• The Bucklogs Here
• Ryan’s Scraps – Lost of the latest news from the edges of Rails and Ruby.
• Riding Rails – The official RoR weblog.
• Rails Jedi – How can you not read a blog with this title??
• Ruby Plus – Lots more awesome screencasts (though not updated in a while)

Podcasts

• Rails Envy – These guys go through the latest and greatest in the Rails world.  Not a show for the faint hearted though
• The SD Ruby Podcast – Nice screencasts from the Sand Diego Ruby group, a wide variety of topics.
• Railscasts – Ryan Bates’ awesome snippets of knowledge.  4-10 minute screencasts which nicely wrap up a topic or idea.  Highly recommended.
• Learning Rails – A series of both audio and video podcasts, starting from “what is rails” and eventually building to server deployment, version control, alternate markup languages, etc.

Other Misc Tools

• The GitHub Blog
• Heroku Blog
• Phusion Passenger Blog – Blog of the apache/rails module

That’s it for now…  Hopefully some of these will help you out in the quest for knowledge!

Related posts (maybe):

1. At Home With Nested Routes and Resources

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Help, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.