Ask HN: Learning Ruby beyond Codeacademy

1 points by DanInTokyo 12y ago ↗ HN

I've been learning Ruby of late - my background includes some coding, mostly enough-to-get-by Javascript and PHP, but I'm in marketing and not currently any sort of engineer. However, I've got a side project I want to get going and I'd really like to do it myself... at least get it up and running, as much for ego as anything else. So, I'm teaching myself Ruby (at 33 and married, going back to school isn't a particularly feasible idea).

I've gone through quite a bit of the Codeacademy classes, but I'm not sure where else I should be looking. I'm also curious what complementary technologies I should be looking into - Rails, I assume, but should I be digging more into things like cloud server administration? I've set up web servers on AWS, but never anything particularly complicated.

Thanks,

- A marketer who wants to be a coder because coding is more fun

4 comments

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daturkel 12y ago ↗

Check out Learn Ruby the Hard Way [0]. You don't have to do every exercise, but check out the titles and do the ones with names of stuff you might have only skimmed over in code academy. CA is good for teaching syntax, but L*HW is good for teaching you to actually make stuff using good practice.

[0]: http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/

DanInTokyo 12y ago ↗

Danke, will check it out.

ludicast 12y ago ↗

Codeschool is awesome, and gets pretty deep into everything you'd want to know.

gary4gar 12y ago ↗

Learning by Doing.

I suggest you to start building something. If you have no idea what you want to build, ask your family, friends or co-workers for a neat idea that solves a problem & try to build it. if you are unsure about your skills, then pick a dead simple idea. complexity of idea is not important. More importantly, the satisfaction taking an idea & turning into reality is amazing.

This is how you will go from a novice learner to experienced developer that ships code that people actually use.