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Closed 10 years ago.
Is the Rails for Zombies course on CodeSchool useful?
I am thinking weather it is worth my time, taking it and if it really provides useful resources?
I haven't done any other CodeSchool courses till now. What do you think about the platform? Is it worth paying for other payed courses?
Are there any high quality free online web development courses?
It's meant just to get you excited with the awesome Rails features :)
It will give you the very basics of Ruby and Rails and nothing more.
Actually the framework is much more complicated and time consuming. If you really would like to work with it, that course might be a showcase of some of it's best features.
Anyway it's worth checking it out if you are Ruby or Rails beginner.
The best thing about the current ruby/rails eco-system is there are a multitude of learning resource options out there, and it should't be too hard for anyone to find the ones suited to their needs/aptitude/...
Try out the Rails For Zombies course and a few other CodeSchool courses for free, and decide for yourself if you like them, and want to go for the paid courses.
I am partial to Ruby on Rails Tutorial as the best free resource to learn web development with Rails. The book available for free online. It provides the best introduction to all the concepts & tools involved while working with ruby/rails to build web applications.
RailsCasts - both the free version & the premium version - would be my next recommendation in building up skills.
Take a look at the answers for Best online (free) resources for learning Ruby on Rails? to learn about more alternatives, and pick what works for you.
Quite a few people in the ruby community rave about Why's poignant guide to ruby as one of the best resources to learn ruby, but it didn't work for me. After spending a little time on it, I moved on to Learn to program which turned out to be a perfect fit for my style :-)
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm a college student trying to make a web community with friends. Although we are not experienced developers by any means, we have taken courses on JAVA and some web programming languages (PHP, JAVASCRIPT, CSS, HTML).
At this point, we need to decide on a web framework and begin learning. I have narrowed down my list to Ruby on Rails and Codeigniter, but I am really not sure why I should pick one over the other.
Thanks in advance.
Pick the one you want to learn and go with it.
I will personally recommend Rails because:
it teaches you a lot of best practices if you do things the Rails Way™
Ruby is a fun, easy-to-learn, expressive language
the community is really big, enthusiastic, and very helpful
there's great books and tutorials available all over the internet
There is nothing like the good framework. It highly depends on, in no particular order :
your skills
your tastes (Yes, it does matter a lot)
your willingness to learn
technical constraints. Your hosting company may support only Ruby or only PHP
...
I personally had the occasion to develop with CodeIgniter and I pretty much enjoyed it. It is light, well documented and leaves you with a lot of freedom.
I also have a good friend for whom Ruby On Rails is the only framework deserving the name of "framework".
If your project is ambitious, a good idea to make your point could be to make a trivial application like a TODO list with both framework and then pick the one that fits your need.
Hope this helps.
If there is no time constraint (as you need to learn both ruby lang and rails framework) and want to know the best practices, i would recommend RubyonRails.
If you have time constraint, then go ahead with Codeigniter. It is easy to learn and well documented.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I want to build an e-commerce application with a bunch of features, as multi-language and currency support and some social interaction between the users (it is a fashion store).
I am doing this basically for learning purposes, but also with the hope of earn a little money with it afterwards.
My question is, do you think with all the solutions out there, it is still worth to start from scratch? Which are the pros and cons, and which frameworks do you suggest?
I tend to use ruby on rails, but I know there are also Java and PHP based solutions, so I wonder about the pros and cons of them here as well...
Thanks in advance.
You can make money selling it to non-developer clients for sure. But if you are trying to make a business of an e-commerce platform you will find rough open source competition.
Check out these options:
PHP:
OpenCart
OSCommerce
Magento
Rails:
Spree
In my case I prepared a web-shop application out of one of the open source ones.
Now for learning it is a good experience start from scratch but it will be difficult to make money of it as a platform unless you do it open source and get paid in advertisement
You'll never learn more than when you build an app that does something you want to do for yourself. If your goal is to learn, go for it.
That said, if your goal is to make money selling stuff, you probably should skip ahead to selling -- use an existing platform like Shopify or Spree and start worrying about what you're going to sell and who is going to buy it. That's a totally different challenge from software development.
Good luck either way.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I've finally gotten a handle on rails, and feel comfortable enough with it to start learning best practices, with the first on my list being TDD principles. What are the best resources to learn about TDD with Rails? Books, tutorials, anything. I'm hungry to learn!
If you want to buy a book, I would suggest you to look at pragmatic rails test prescriptions . It's not stuck with an implementation as the rspec book is and will more probably let you choose the tools YOU want.
I feel it is also better to read this book than million posts where pro/con BDD/TDD are spinning around ;)
Have a look at this one: http://pragprog.com/titles/achbd/the-rspec-book
My usual answer involving Rails and learning usually ends up at Railscasts. Check out the testing section. While there's not one specifically on TDD, most of them touch on the subject. Especially Cucumber, etc.
I would suggest you focus on the basics here! Don't fall in love with any specific way of doing TDD like rspec, shoulda or similar. Wait with that part until you understand the basics of rails TDD - THEN you can go out and add testing tools to your toolbox.
Start by writing a simple test for some part of your app where the logic does something else than CRUD work, some place where you handle some kind of math, or weird user behavior and try to write a test for that case - but make sure you have the time for it, because it will require much more time than expected the first time.
Once you have that test case running and working - and you fully understand why, then your ready to expand and start to play with all the wonderful testing tools out there.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Please advice me some really great Ruby on Rails 3 application which i can use like example of best practices in Rails 3. The idea is i want to have the app on my hdd which i can use like reference when i have any questions how to implement some feature. It could be any blog engine, or app like Redmine does not matter but it should have almost all elements/functionality which is used to have any web application. And it should be done by using best practices from Ruby and Rails 3 point of view.
There are definitely many apps on github to learn from. However a lot of solutions are very unique for particular contexts and everyone is always at some stage in their learning. Even in the best apps you should be able to find plenty to disagree with.
Here's a list of a few notable ones.
This is rubygems.org, strong community effort, has a lot of neat practices: https://github.com/rubygems/gemcutter
This project isn't necessarily best practices, but it's so loud and has so many people involved in working out all kinds of initially-written crap, that it may shape into something interesting: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
This is a popular e-commerce rails app for you to build upon. Haven't read the code, but again, it's pretty popular, which means, well supported by community: https://github.com/railsdog/spree
For more check out awesome github's explore page: https://github.com/explore.
P.S. Bucketwise is a Rails2 app created by Jamis Buck (of 37signals and Rails core). It's still worth watching even if you're looking for Rails 3 insights.
I like the Getting Started with Rails guides. They're not really a complete app, but they are good examples of how things should be done and should be current.
You can also search on Github for Rails apps. The source code should be viewable, and if you have an account you can watch the various projects and see what's new.
Opinions of "best practices" vary widely. I would just read a ton of rails 3 code on github, and then read a ton more! By reading code, you will learn what is common in the rails world and develop your own best practices.
rails3-devise-mongoid is a good one
as is ror_ecommerce
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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm working creating rails application and wondered where I can find good
tutorials on how to work with rails.
I used this blog that I thought was great in starting to learn rails:
http://fairleads.blogspot.com/2007/12/rails-20-and-scaffolding-step-by-step.html
I have just started working with rails and would like to learn more advanced rails now.
There are a lot of sources for learn Rails,
railscasts.com/
newwiki.rubyonrails.org/
http://www.ruby-forum.com/forum/3
these are free screencasts and forum, if you want a book I recommend you Rails Way by Obie Fernandez.
Definitely http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
There are also some really good commercial screencasts found here:
http://peepcode.com/
http://envycasts.com/
However, most of the more advanced tutorials are scattered amongst blog posts targeting specific problems or features. I used to have rubycorner.com in my google reader and would monitor it for useful content and subscribe to individual feeds of blogs I found had consistently good content.
Also, Apidock.com has rails, ruby, and rspec documentation in a great user interface along with a lot of useful user comments.
I completely disagree about the Rails Way. That is a good book once you already largely understand rails basics but it really isn't tutorial style. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
My advice is that you should look for a book that is more tutorial oriented and that has been released very recently because rails changes so fast that your book will be out of date in a blink. Pick your own project and follow along the tutorial adapting it for your projects needs. Invariably, unless you are doing something absurdly simple, you will find that the tutorials come up short and you will have to research solutions for yourself but that it the best way to learn.
Be very aware that almost all the tutorials online are out of date. Probably more than half the railscasts are for pre 2.0 rails. Rails Guides are pretty good and uptodate and have even started including notes for differences between versions.
Also get the RSS feeds for sites like Ruby Inside, Ruby Flow and Rails Inside. They are but a few Ruby/Rails blogs, and there are heaps more, but a good start, and a great way to find infor mation you would never have know about. A lot of material is not for the beginner, but don't let that overwhelm you, having alll the info there will pay off and there are some great getting started things on there sometimes that might be just what you are after.