Comments on: Roadmap for Learning Rails

By: Eric Bouchut

Eric Bouchut — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:11:28 +0000

MozDev would be a useful addition to the Web section, as it covers HTML, CSS and Javascript:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/learn

Thank you for this interesting post and the step by step approach.

Eric.

By: techiferous

techiferous — Tue, 01 May 2012 22:04:15 +0000

Ryan,

Thanks for telling me about the dead HTML5 link. Apparently that broke when Mark Pilgrim’s online presence disappeared back in October 2011. I’ve updated it.

Nanoc is great for drying up your static HTML files. Even though you are authoring static HTML files, they all may share the same sidebar, for instance. So to make a change in your sidebar, you’d have to manually update all of your HTML pages. Nanoc allows you to specify the sidebar HTML once and programmatically include it in all of your pages.

The main reason I included Nanoc was to get used to HTML templates; that is, mixing code in with HTML.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:52:33 +0000

Hi, really love the resource and am following it pretty closely. Two things – 1 update and 1 question:

Update for the HTML 5 link (Dive Into HTML) is no longer a valid link.

Question is for Nanoc. I don’t quite follow what the benefit of using it over HTML is since both are static? Why use Ruby for no reason?

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 05:09:31 +0000

Your article is invaluable to me as I learn how to program. I will bookmark your site, and also reference it on my blog where I am documenting my learning process (if you don’t mine). I appreciate the effort you took writing this very informative post.

By: Rooby G

Rooby G — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:50:34 +0000

I think the easiest way to get to Rails or Django or other similar framework is to start by learning HTML, then CSS, then Javascript, then PHP + MySQL, then Rails/Django/etc.
HTML will teach you basic web markup. CSS will teach you basic design. Javascript, basic interactive functions in the browser. PHP, server-side knowledge and how to create dynamic pages. MySQL, for how databases work and how to use them in CRUD situations, or more elaborate ones.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:39:48 +0000

This is an excellent post. I appreciate coming across this resource. I have searched the web for similar posts on how a beginner “non-programmer” should ideally get up to speed on Rails and nothing else comes close. I am also happy to see that your recommended path is very similar to what I have been outlining for myself. Thanks.

By: Shahid K

Shahid K — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:39:45 +0000

Brilliant work man, I’ve been looking and searching for something like this for quite some time now. Things can get a lot confusing for the beginners, and the more they read the more muddy it seems to get. This is very helpful, Thanks!

By: Pete Dunham

Pete Dunham — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 02:04:35 +0000

Wyatt,

Ma’te, listen ! This is excellent roadmap.

I am seasoned developer, also web developer. I coded JAVA and I used to teach JAVA.
[ Struts, Servlets, Tomcat, some others, etc.etc.]

So, I know how to learn from my experience. Also, I know what difficulties that people face with during their learning, especially programming.

I started learning ruby and ruby on rails and come across your article.
I didn’t get into rails first, since – as you say – it might be confusing.

I definitely agree that ruby skills are very important for rails, or for being in the ruby world.
[ web development or not ]

I have written a Tetris game with ruby using Goshu game library. It was nice and fun experience.

I started reading rails guides, did something very basic, like small web applications, used RVM on Ubuntu etc.etc.
All these ruby, ruby on rails, gem and code reading stuff.

After all these personal buzz:
Since I am in the phase of shining my ruby skills and learning rails I will follow your roadmap.

PS: Thanks a lot for including nanoc here, it definitely is very important, I do totally agree. Also, I was going to use Jekyll for my blog and company articles but after seeing nanoc, I have decided to use nanoc. It is really cool one.

There is a lot to write about this learning process but I better stop now

All The Best,
—

By: techiferous

techiferous — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:09:26 +0000

@Jack: Wonderful! I’m glad you found value in this; that’s exactly why I wrote this.

By: Jack

Jack — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:36:47 +0000

As a complete beginner it was difficult to find this kind of straightforward advice on how to approach learning RoR. Thank you so much for the direction.