How to start learning Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails for dummies

Prajval Prabhakar
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

Ruby and Rails are considered the same as the chicken and egg problem. Most beginners don’t know which one to learn first. There’s a lot of confusion surrounding this among beginners. I did a bit of programming in Ruby first before I started Rails. So I don’t know if it is better to start Rails first but it definitely was an advantage to know Ruby before Rails as it made the learning a whole lot easier.

Ruby on Rails

First, lets consider Ruby. If you have already done a bit of programming in other languages, then learning Ruby won’t be that much of a difficulty. There are so many resources online and picking any of them wouldn't make much of a difference. On the other hand if you are new to programming, I don’t think Ruby would be a bad start to programming as your first language. It is a very good language to understand Object Oriented(OO) Concepts as well. If you do choose Ruby I would recommend you to start with an interactive course with lots of exercises. The most important thing is to always ask questions to every single line of code you write.

When I wanted to learn rails, I started going through a lot of blogs, lots of online tutorials. None of them were good enough for me. The problem with most of these resources is that all of them make some assumptions about the knowledge of the reader. For absolute beginners with no knowledge whatsoever of rails or web development, this book by Michael Hartl (https://www.railstutorial.org/book) was simply brilliant. The entire book can be completed in 3–4 days tops(if you are in a hurry) and it walks you through the entire process of creating a twitter-like application. I would recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in learning Rails. I would suggest not to just to copy paste the code in the book and rather learn each and every code fragment line by line.

Happy learning Ruby on Rails!!!!

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