3 ms·

Personally, if you want to learn something - jump in and learn it - do what interests you. I started with Rails first (someone sent me a PDF of an early Rails

by mtkd 16y ago

Personally, if you want to learn something - jump in and learn it - do what interests you. I started with Rails first (someone sent me a PDF of an early Rails manual - I started skimming it about 8am, finished the entire book of 300+ pages by supper - not sure I even ate anything in-between). After playing with Rails for a few months I started to look at Ruby itself - it's an awesome language.

sradnidge 16y ago
Absolutely - i guess I was more just saying think about the reasons first. When I started I was set on Rails too, purely because that's the thing most people talk about and for newbies it's easy to just see it as "the done thing" if you know what I mean, and not look for alternatives. I got onto Sinatra when I quickly realised Rails was way too heavy for what i wanted to do. But you're absolutely right, the best way to learn anything is to just jump in, and absolutely nothing wrong with Rails!
- frankdenbow 16y ago
  I have had the same path that you describe. Started learning Rails and quickly realizing that Sinatra handles most of my needs, and is faster to get started with. It is also helpful to separate my ruby learning with understanding the rails framework. Will check out those resources!
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
vermasque 16y ago
Emphasis on doing what interests you. I wanted to learn Rails because there's plenty of work opportunities for it, Ruby is neat, and is built around a *nix and OSS. Do what you like. I started learning web dev with Rails recently and am very close to deploying a small but significant project. Here's my two cents on how to learn: 0. Pick something you want to build. Solve a problem that nags you or someone else. Or reimplement something as you think it should be. Hack to learn. 1. If you're new to web dev, go to wikipedia to at least figure out how all the parts fit together (JS/CSS/HTML on client side, web servers, etc.). You should be able to at least diagram what does what. 2. For JS, CSS, and HTML, w3schools is a great place to start. Read all of the stuff on there for those three things (JQuery, HTML5, CSS3, etc. can be put off for a short time). It's relatively light and concise so it can be read entirely up front. Write yourself some pages to test what you read. Styling can be fun! 3. Unlike the previous reading topics, I would NOT suggest reading a massive book or all the Rails guides up front. I get bored on long reading stretches and question the effectiveness of the time spent; I'm sure this is common. I prefer to do a little reading to get me started, build something until I need to figure out a missing piece, read to fill in the puzzle, and repeat. You'll make mistakes along the way, but you'll learn actively. You'll slowly pick up the fundamentals of Ruby without having to read an entire language primer. You can and should improve your skill over time by supplementing it with more comprehensive resources. However, that's for another day after you have something minimal running. If you know an overview of Rails, you can at least outline an architecture of your app to be built. Then you figure out how to implement the parts of that architecture using Rails by selectively reading small parts of a variety of sources. For me, I used snippets of the Rails guides, Hartl's book, Stack Overflow, the Rails API docs, and a variety of blog posts. I bought one of the Peepcode screencasts but didn't see the great benefit that is suggested by their user comments. Start easy and work towards the hard stuff. At least you'll have a string of small accomplishments for encouragement to go further. On the other hand, I ended up reading 70% of the dev guide for Android to build my first app. It's in a world of its own so you have to do the long reading haul.

by mtkd 16y ago

sradnidge 16y ago

Absolutely - i guess I was more just saying think about the reasons first. When I started I was set on Rails too, purely because that's the thing most people talk about and for newbies it's easy to just see it as "the done thing" if you know what I mean, and not look for alternatives. I got onto Sinatra when I quickly realised Rails was way too heavy for what i wanted to do. But you're absolutely right, the best way to learn anything is to just jump in, and absolutely nothing wrong with Rails!

frankdenbow 16y ago
I have had the same path that you describe. Started learning Rails and quickly realizing that Sinatra handles most of my needs, and is faster to get started with. It is also helpful to separate my ruby learning with understanding the rails framework. Will check out those resources!

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

vermasque 16y ago

Emphasis on doing what interests you. I wanted to learn Rails because there's plenty of work opportunities for it, Ruby is neat, and is built around a *nix and OSS. Do what you like. I started learning web dev with Rails recently and am very close to deploying a small but significant project. Here's my two cents on how to learn: 0. Pick something you want to build. Solve a problem that nags you or someone else. Or reimplement something as you think it should be. Hack to learn. 1. If you're new to web dev, go to wikipedia to at least figure out how all the parts fit together (JS/CSS/HTML on client side, web servers, etc.). You should be able to at least diagram what does what. 2. For JS, CSS, and HTML, w3schools is a great place to start. Read all of the stuff on there for those three things (JQuery, HTML5, CSS3, etc. can be put off for a short time). It's relatively light and concise so it can be read entirely up front. Write yourself some pages to test what you read. Styling can be fun! 3. Unlike the previous reading topics, I would NOT suggest reading a massive book or all the Rails guides up front. I get bored on long reading stretches and question the effectiveness of the time spent; I'm sure this is common. I prefer to do a little reading to get me started, build something until I need to figure out a missing piece, read to fill in the puzzle, and repeat. You'll make mistakes along the way, but you'll learn actively. You'll slowly pick up the fundamentals of Ruby without having to read an entire language primer. You can and should improve your skill over time by supplementing it with more comprehensive resources. However, that's for another day after you have something minimal running. If you know an overview of Rails, you can at least outline an architecture of your app to be built. Then you figure out how to implement the parts of that architecture using Rails by selectively reading small parts of a variety of sources. For me, I used snippets of the Rails guides, Hartl's book, Stack Overflow, the Rails API docs, and a variety of blog posts. I bought one of the Peepcode screencasts but didn't see the great benefit that is suggested by their user comments. Start easy and work towards the hard stuff. At least you'll have a string of small accomplishments for encouragement to go further. On the other hand, I ended up reading 70% of the dev guide for Android to build my first app. It's in a world of its own so you have to do the long reading haul.