Ask HN: Recommend me a learning course for RoR | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recommend me a learning course for RoR

2 pointsacconrad3 comments

Hi guys,

I'm a fairly good C# developer by day, but I have an idea for a business. I've decided I want to whip up my MVP in Ruby on Rails. I don't know Ruby/Rails, but I'm already a fairly competent programmer so it's not like I'm starting completely from scratch. I need to learn a subset of the language for building out a web application (think Yelp) as quickly as possible. As much as I'd love to dive in and learn Ruby/Rails thoroughly, I'm just too excited about my idea to learn the language/framework first and then start on my startup.

What would you recommend I read at the bare minimum so I can get this idea into a prototype?

Relevant similar technologies I work with and have solid knowledge in:

C#, ASP.NET (MVC), MS SQL Server, MySQL, Java, C/C++, HTML/CSS, jQuery/Javascript.

Hartl's http://www.RailsTutorial.org/book is excellent for all levels. Also look into http://www.tryruby.org and consider using Sinatra if you really wanna jump in right away. Rails gets better with time in that it's really built for getting some common things done fast - so convention over configuration is the game here. Sinatra on the other hand is well, it lets you take the stage asap.

Regardless, look into Hartl's book. Then, scourge gitHub for similar OSS projects to see how people think in Ruby. For your use case, look into social networks like LovdByLess and the book above implements a twitter clone, both great examples.

Also, since you're new to this Rails business, you might as well consider Django or Pylons for a minute - it's likely possible you might even like python over ruby, but that doesn't really matter at the end of the day as long as you enjoy the framework, community and the libraries.

I highly recommend Agile Web Development with Rails, its a very fast read and will get you off the ground and running in no time - http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...

They also have a beta version of the 4th edition for sale which gets updated every few weeks with the new changes if you are interested in learning rails 3, although you would truthfully be fine sticking with rails 2.x. Best of luck!

What do you guys think of Rails for .NET Developers?

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