Rubynoob

One thing I've found out that's important to do before jumping headfirst into Ruby on Rails is familiarizing yourself with the Ruby language. I started going through some tutorials back when I first got excited about the whole idea surrounding RoR. While the demos were awesome, I didn't really understand what the hell I was doing. Ruby the language looks so much different than c# or java or any of the other languages I've used. So, let's look at my Learning Ruby resources.

I'm currently using mainly just two resources. The first has the odd name of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby,it's completely free and it is certainly one of the strangest "books" I've ever read, technical or not. And that's saying quite a lot because I've read some pretty odd stuff in my time. However, it has hands down the best explanation of Ruby's blocks and iterators that I've found. This aspect of Ruby seems to be one of it's most powerful features, but it's been pretty difficult for me to really wrap my brain around. Why does a pretty good job of explaining it though. The book is really written with totally new coders in mind, but I've managed to distill quite a bit of good information from it. Try it out - just don't expect to read the entire thing in one setting - that might cause hallucinations or something!

My other favorite resource for learning Ruby is much more traditional, though probably a lot more complete. I really enjoy the Pragmatic Programmer's Guide to Learning Ruby. This reads much more like a normal book and is also full of great content. I suggest checking out the Pragmatic Programmers website and considering purchasing a PDF version of the book. I have a two monitor setup on my desk and I find that keeping the PDF open while working through the examples works much better than trying to type in the code while holding the book open on my lap. The PDF contains links to the source code on the web and is just generally more convenient. The book, though, is much easier to read away from my computer.

It's going to take me quite a while to master this language -there's a lot of new stuff, or at least new ways of doing old stuff. The nice thing is that Ruby is just a lot of fun to learn!