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Ask HN: Where is the best place to learn Ruby?

9 points by GoofyGewber ↗ HN
I've been trying to lean Ruby, and I can't find any good tutorials. Anyone have any (Free?) tutorials they recommend?

19 comments

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fananta
Did you mean Ruby itself? or RoR? For the latter, the Michael Hartl Ruby on Rails Tutorial is pretty good: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/beginning
GoofyGewber
Well, you're suppose to learn Ruby before Ruby on Rails right? Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.
glimcat
If you have previous programming experience, I don't think that it matters much. You can always look stuff up as you go if you already know enough to know what you're looking for.
zampano
Honestly, if you're planning on focusing on Rails eventually, I'd start with the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl (http://ruby.railstutorial.org). It's easy to get lost as a total beginner with all the various things Ruby itself is capable of, when you might have better results focusing on a smaller subset of the whole, at least to start. Rails tutorial also has a chapter early on (one of the first five) that contains an intro to ruby and can point you in the right direction from there.

Book-wise, you can't go wrong with The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Grounded-Rubyist-David-Black/...) to begin with. I found it a lot more approachable than the Pickaxe book early on.

Good luck, Ruby was my first language and I learned a lot about learning programming languages from that experience.

damian2000
Highly recommend this free 5 week Coursera course out of UC Berkeley. All development is in Ruby and Rails. There is some introductory Ruby material - you don't need to have any prior knowledge. It started last week, but you can join late without a problem.

https://www.coursera.org/course/saas

Oh yeah the optional textbook that goes with it is available on kindle for $10.

GoingKerouac
I enrolled today.

I wonder what the intentions of these universities are by offering these courses for free. (seriously) hm...

It might just be me being a pessimist, but they have to have some kind of evil motive, right? It seems unheard of that any university offers something for free.

Found this article about Coursera... http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/18/net-us-usa-college...

I guess I'll just enjoy it while it lasts.

For the OP I'd suggest why's guide http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/chapter-1.htm...