Ask HN: What are the best resources for learning Ruby/Rails

15 points by d_mcgraw ↗ HN
I'm looking to teach myself a new Web Dev language and have landed on Ruby/Rails. What are the best resources out there for learning Ruby/Rails if you are already a programmer with web experience?

10 comments

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Not sure why you'd want to learn Ruby/Rails. Ruby has been dropping in use for a few years now, and it looks like that downward trend will accelerate.

Have you considered Python/Django?

Is that really true? Most of the companies I've talked to are looking for people with Ruby/Rails experience. I've seen some looking for Python Django experience, but far less. I currently do Python dev at work. I've looked a Django, but I wasn't super impressed, but again maybe I'm just not finding the right resources for learning to work with it. Any suggestions there?
Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial is a good start (look closely, there is free access online):

http://railstutorial.org/

It's not perfect, but it does walk you through the process of setting up a proper environment, using git for version control, and pushing to Heroku for rapid deployment. He even explains different basics and features of the Ruby language, so you can start here without learning Ruby if you so desire. Definitely complete the additional tasks at the end of each chapter as they are very helpful.

Also, I found it helpful to browse through the many open-source Rails projects you can find online, particularly on github.