Want to learn Rails? Start here.

Somewhat tangential, but I wish there were more comprehensive learning resources for Clojure, particularly getting started with web development. Given that there is no equivalent of Django or Rails, and web development in clj is really about assembling a collection of libraries (Ring, Compojure/Moustache, Enlive/Hiccup etc), it is much harder for the initiate to understand how everything fits together. The fact that Rails is so opinionated also really helps the new developer become productive in a relatively short timeframe.<p>I'd imagine this would apply to just about any other language as well really. The Ruby community really is fortunate to have such brilliant free resources out there for learning Rails and the language.

Usual things in rails is really simple but doing unusual things requires going down a rabbit hole of google searching, rdoc, blogs, etc due to the modularity (I had this issue with thor) of rails.

Very solid approach. As an incoming Fall '12 DBC student, I've found Ruby Koans (<a href="http://rubykoans.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rubykoans.com/</a>) and Ruby Cookbook (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cookbook-Cookbooks-OReilly-Lucas-Carlson/dp/0596523696" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Cookbook-Cookbooks-OReilly-Lucas-Carls...</a>) to be incredibly helpful in grounding and adding more context to my Rails Tutorial experience.

<a href="http://schneems.com/ut-rails" rel="nofollow">http://schneems.com/ut-rails</a>

So basically<p>1: Study it<p>2: When you're lost, research and ask someone<p>?

I'm a big fan of the giving myself some kind of challenge to prove out a framework or technology. Like, "build a meme site" or "build twitter" or something like that. It does two things. One, you are forced to use the technology for a real thing to solve real problems. Two, it becomes very apparent how good the documentation/community/libraries are. Both are critical because most any technology can solve most any problem you throw at it if you are willing to write enough code, but the libraries, documentation, and community make a huge difference in the day to day experience of using any language or framework.

I'm actually in the process of learning Ruby right now. I'm curious though. From the perspective of someone who has hasn't been programming for a long time, would you consider it a good idea to learn Ruby before learning Rails? I'm waiting on my copy of The Well-Grounded Rubyist to arrive so I can get started.

And some more: <a href="http://pineapple.io/resources/tagged/ruby-on-rails?type=tutorials" rel="nofollow">http://pineapple.io/resources/tagged/ruby-on-rails?type=tuto...</a>

The article doesn't mention <a href="http://railsforzombies.org" rel="nofollow">http://railsforzombies.org</a>.<p>Which is a great first tutorial to get some basic with Rails.

Here's another good list, and it takes contributions on GitHub. <a href="http://iwanttolearnruby.com/" rel="nofollow">http://iwanttolearnruby.com/</a>