Over the last 6 months I have immersed myself in Ruby On Rails or ROR. I’ve learned some things the easy way and others the HARD way. This post summarizes the best elements of what I learned in my journey thus far, and in my opinion, the optimal “LEAN” way start learning ROR.

My LEAN recommended steps to ROR success:

1. Navigate over to Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial and work through chapters 1-4. (Non-windows users, I highly recommend following the instructions for installing Guard and Spork.)
2. Once you finish up chapter 4, which is devoted to learning Ruby, check out the “Ruby Primer” lesson over at RubyMonk. This will build your Ruby expertise substantially.
3. Continue Hartl’s tutorial with chapter 5 and complete the remaining chapters.
4. Next install and run RuboCop. RuboCop is a Ruby static code analyzer. Out of the box it will enforce many of the guidelines outlined in the community Ruby Style Guide. This will force you to learn and following efficient coding practices. Although at this point you have written your first live ROR web app it is full of poor styling and inefficient methods. When refactoring your methods please reference step 5 below.
5. Refactor your code based on Sandi Metz’s Rules.
6. That’s it! Not only have you learned how to efficiently build your first live ROR web app, but you have done so while strictly following the Ruby Style Guide, and the excellent coding practices of Sandi Metz. This puts you a step above most beginning Ruby on Rails programmers.

You may now be asking yourself “Is that it?” and the answer is “No!”. You may have learned the initial skills necessary to design and deploy a ROR app, but there is still a long way to go. Below are a few resources I have followed to continue my journey as the aspiring web developer I am.

• RailsCasts by Ryan Bates
• The other lessons on RubyMonk
• Beginners Guide to Angular JS Rails