How did you learn RoR?

First things: You need to know MVC, and you need to know Ruby. MVC takes a little while to wrap your brain around if you've only ever done things like PHP. There isn't really a great overview document for MVC, but if you do some google searching and wikipediaing, you can find some stuff. Understand what goes in the controller, and in the model, and in the view, and why we bother to separate them.<p>Then learn Ruby. There are a bunch of resources for this. Why's Poignant Guide is hilarious, but rather opaque. I recommend a book by David Black called Ruby for Rails, but I'm sure O'Reilly has some fine books too.<p>Now you're ready to start learning Rails. The online documentation is usually poorly organized -- at best. If you can afford it, pick up Agile Web Development with Rails. It's in its second edition now, and is much much better at introducing you to rails than any online resource I've seen. Maybe someone else here can recommend an online tutorial I haven't seen, but they seem to generally be more out of date than the books, rather than the other way around.

I followed through with a couple of online tutorials, then tried making my own app. I found it to be pretty difficult once I got past scaffolding and doing non-cookie-cutter things, seeing as how I didn't know much about the concept of MVC or where the line between Ruby ended and RoR began.<p>So, I picked up a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails and had at that for maybe a month, then I grabbed a copy of Programming Ruby (the pickaxe book). <p>I was also constantly asking questions and reading what was going on in IRC in the #rubyonrails room on freenode. Now I lurk around in there and answer the occasional question. Another great help was all of the RoR info being posted on reddit, but that site isn't even a shadow of its former glory now. <p>If you're more disciplined than I am, learn Ruby first, then learn RoR. Personally, I have a hard time doing that because my mind is always crawling with ideas, so I just dive right in to new things and figure out what I'm doing piece by piece.

I just went and built something with it - <a href="http://alltimetop5.com" rel="nofollow">http://alltimetop5.com</a> I'm shocking at busy work for no good reason so I had to wait until a good enough idea came along to motivate me. The first version I just threw out, there were too many artefacts left from me stumbling wildly around.<p>I think that might be the point where you can call yourself proficient at ror, when you finally get how ugly the first code you wrote was :)

Learn by doing. One way that I do is try to implement existing sites. This lets you concentrate on building the product instead of designing how it will look and feel. For example. Building this site in RoR would be a great exercise as the scope is large enough to include many features but not so large as to be impossible.<p>That said I wrote this blog entry a while ago that explains the main resources that i used to learn RoR. <a href="http://www.productcriticblog.com/2007/03/top-6-resources-to-learn-ruby-on-rails.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.productcriticblog.com/2007/03/top-6-resources-to-learn-ruby-on-rails.html</a>

For me, the first step was to want to build something. That gave me the drive to want to find out how.<p>AWDR & Pickaxe are pretty indispensable (although I picked up Pickaxe much later). There are also loads of really great blogs (jamis buck, err the blog ..) and forums (railsweenie, ruby-forum ..) out there worth checking out regularly.

I've learned things like PHP and Flash entirely through poking around online tutorials, but I can't seem to catch on by doing the same with RoR. I guess the philosophy of RoR is drastically different from what I'm used to.<p>How did you guys learn rails? I really want to learn it, but the tutorials aren't really working for me.

I used three books in this order<p>Agile web development with Rails (for learning rails initially)<p>Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper (for learning ruby)<p>Rails Recipes (for doing useful stuff)<p>While reading these I also worked on converting an existing web app into rails.

Same as awt - I built something with it (<a href="http://www.charitycheckout.com)." rel="nofollow">http://www.charitycheckout.com).</a> It's amazing how building something really helps you focus on the parts of the framework and core language you need to learn.

Got a book. Read it. Installed it. Followed the demo app. Wrote a small sample app. Wrote a larger sample app. Applied for related jobs. Got a related job. Worked hard. The End?

I got a consulting project, told the client I was using RoR, and now I'm learning it. I think I've learned just about everything like this, with RoR being the most recent.

Buy pick axe book. Buy agile web development on rails book. Ruby cookbook is good as well. Build something. Subscribe to rails/ruby blogs.

I should add I also got the Agile Web development book by Dave Thomas to support my learning.

I built something with it.