Best places I’ve found for learning Rails

28 July 2008
Robb Shecter

I’ve found some excellent online resources that I’ve been using — and these are pretty much all I’ve needed.

Screencasts

These two are awesome. I subscribe through iTunes, but that’s not necessary. Take the earlier ones (pre-2008) with a small grain of salt because they may not be 100% Rails 2 compatible. (In practice, though, I’ve found that 99% of the advice here is still accurate, and where Rails 2 differs, it’s in new facilities provided.)

Railscasts with Ryan Bates

This is a huge collection of short, focused screencasts, most around 7 or 8 minutes long. Some are indispensable —they’re the only source of info I’ve found on several advanced topics. A couple examples that I’ve watched and found really helpful are #106 — Time Zones in Rails 2.1, #115 — Caching in Rails 2.1, and #63 — Model Name in URL.

Learning Rails — Free Online Course in Ruby on Rails

This screencast series is more traditional; the episodes are closer to a half-hour in length and they walk through the example of building a complete application. All the same, though, I jumped in at the middle, and made good use of Testing Your Site Part 1 & 2. (I couldn’t find an easy way to link to these.)

Webpages

Amazingly, I’ve found the Rails API pages to be the best resources; both when I was just learning, and still now. I’d always use Google as my point of entry to find which one was appropriate, but once there, many of them have excellent descriptions that put all the pieces in perspective. I wish I had known to look here first, when I was learning Rails.

Here are a few of my favorites for good reading:

ActiveRecord — The “Model” in the MVC architecture

Validations — How a model protects its integrity

Associations — Descriptively setting up the relationships between models

UrlHelper — A utility that’s really good to know about