Starting out development with Ruby on Rails.

Hello there,
Well I'm creating this thread because starting out in ROR can be really challenging, once you get the hang of it, it gets very fun and you just want to learn more and more but first few steps can be difficult. So those who are already pro's lets help out those who are starting out by sharing how we first learned rails.

I'll start with my experience:
I actually applied for Ruby On Rails internship without completely understanding rails, and I had an interview scheduled in 3-4 days so I had to learn ROR quickly, so these are the things I did:
( I am skipping the installation and stuff, since you can easily find tutorials on that, for Ubuntu users I recommend this https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-ruby-on-rails-on-ubuntu-12-04-lts-precise-pangolin-with-rvm )

1. Learn the basic syntax and get used to ruby interpreter.

You don't need to dive too deep into the language, although if you do its always a good thing. For me, I just learnt the basic syntax and some of the major differences from various tutorials on the internet including this book: http://www.railstutorial.org/book/rails_flavored_ruby (this used to be free back when I learnt :/ ) well you can easily find other free resources, you really needn't spend money.

2. I then followed the official rails guides and created the basic blog they have there.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

I've found that learning by doing is the most effective way of learning anything (at least for me), and official rails guide is also targeted towards those people who like to learn by doing, hence you would find step by step instructions as well explanations for a lot of the things you need to understand from MVC to test driven development.

3. Once you've got a hang of it, you can start using different gems which really do help boost your development speed. The one's I recommend are:
* Devise for authentication
* Bootstrap for UI
* CanCan gem for User role management

Also it would be great if you use a third party database from the beginning instead of using the SQLite rails provides by default, because eventually you might need to migrate. I have been using the MySQL database from the very beginning.

It would be good If you use a repository for your code from the very beginning and maybe a free cloud server like heroku, because it will help you understand how rails makes everything super convenient.

Here's the repository for my first project: https://github.com/rahulmeena13/Publisher , It is a simple publishing app. You can find a link to the actual project in the readme.

It would be great if other rails developers would share their experience here as well.

Hope it helps someone.

Regards

 

Hi Yogesh,

Thanks for sharing your experience. It's useful. There was a time when people of Bangladesh were unknown to this programming language called 'Ruby'. It might introduced to Bangladesh in mid 2007. We can see now many of live web products which are developed in Ruby on Rails like bdipo.com, khanacademybangla.com etc.

I have seen some of books on Ruby on Rails (http://www.nascenia.com/books-on-ruby-on-rails/) which are very good. You can check. I think it will be very helpful too