Hey guys I wanted to know if anyone has purchased this Rails course and what you think of it?
The reason I'm asking is because I'm fairly new at rails and I'm still trying to wrap my ahead around certain things.
Any other advice regarding where to find active blog posts about rails would be greatly appreciated as well.
I'm in a similar position, though have not purchased the rails course you linked.
That said This Book (Agile Web Development with Rails) has been a godsend - and many others in the rails community have said this is the 'go-to' book so I'd suggest giving it a look :)
Iv'e Completed most of the courses at codeschool to date. They are all pretty good to excellent. Especially the rails & ruby courses. Good for beginners & go into good depth too. Can't recommend them enough. Definitely worth the money. Subscribe, its $20 a month if you complete a course. No i don't work for them. : )
I would highly recommend taking a look at Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. The book is online for free, updated frequently, and the related paid screencasts are well worth the money. It won't just teach you Rails best practices, but also best practices as a developer using Ruby on Rails to craft web apps (eg Test-Driven Development, version control, deployment etc). I love the Agile Web Development with Rails book mentioned (it was my intro to Rails, too) but I believe I got more value out of Rails Tutorial.
Edit: I should probably add that Code School are awesome and I have done the course mentioned by #imjp. I thought it was worth the money, for sure.
Instead of purchasing it, you could just subscribe to their newsletter,
Due to the fact that their service is new, they offer all the courses FOR FREE very often.
It's a great course for ruby newbies, and a great site overall!
Related
Im taking on an upcoming project that involved creating and managine a large complex mysql database using RoR. It involved, many table, deep foreign keys, many to many, etc.
Anyone know a good resource (book, website, etc.) which can help me learn how to do it? I need a clearer understanding of migrations and how rails handles relational databases.
Any suggestions?
railscasts.com is great. He talks a lot about setting up your typical HABTM relations polymorphic associations, inner nestings you name it. and Bates makes it extra easy to understand.
Past that I would definately try to start off on the right food using the Metrics gem to monitor database and CPU usage. Always ensuring you're making the lightest touch on the db.
Besides RailsCast, I would recommend RailsLab: Scaling Rails which focus on large Rails application. It seems doesn't update recently, but the post still useful, not only database, but also memory, performance etc.
+1 for Railscasts.com suggestion from Trip. I've gotten a ton out of those since I moved to Ruby and Rails from ColdFusion. I also like the book "The Rails 3 Way" from Obie Fernandez. It has an extensive ActiveRecord section that is very informative both for new Rails users and is a great reference. Another solid one is "Rails 3 In Action" from Ryan BIgg and Yehuda Katz.
You can check out books at the Pragmatic Programmers website. Probably one of the best options is: Agile Web Development with Rails
I also found Ruby on Rails Tutorial to be a good resource.
Also be sure to look at the Rails Guides They are well written and cover many topics in depth. For example, the migrations you mentioned and many to many associations You can even download them for offline use. Here is an answer about how to do that here
Code School have some great interactive courses such as Rails for Zombies.
After finishing with Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl, which parts of the sample app proposed in tutorial should I upgrade first? Authentication method comes to mind first..
Given the huge popularity of that tutorial, I suppose there is something like a list of steps to be taken for that app to become more up-to-date in this ever changing world of web dev etc. etc. etc.
Overall is it a good idea to use that app as a foundation for building something more advanced?
Thanks in advance!
I learned Rails with that book :)
However, even the authentication algorithm used there is great to learn, in practice you can use other alternatives. For example I use the wonderful Devise gem (Railscasts 209 and 210).
There are some ideas at the end of the book that explain how you can extend the application. However, I think that building your own app from scratch is better now that you know how to do it.
After reading that book, I created some basic projects, and in parallel started reading The Ruby Programming Language and The Rails 3 Way.
Hope it helps! Welcome to the Rails world :)
I am an ASP.Net MVC / C# developer looking to get started with Ruby on Rails. Could you point me out to any books / tutorials which would help jump ships quickly.
I am familiar with MVC, Castle Active Record and jquery.
Thanks
Having just gone through this and looking for the best ways to learn ruby and rails I found the following most useful:
http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with-rails (covers Rails 3)
I found this a good starting place to go through the basics of rails and while reading this I was able to follow along and build the application.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
Instead of building an application you get the vertical view of rails - i.e., sections to understand models, caching, views, layouts, etc. This is a great resource to follow along and read the sections you are dealing with.
http://www.railscasts.com
As you come across something you need to implement - e.g., many to many relationships this site provides some great examples and walkthroughs.
As a C# developer you may be slightly confused by Ruby. Here are the sites I recommend for learning Ruby:
http://www.fincher.org/tips/Languages/Ruby/
Although not formatted great - I found this one very useful to get the gist of Ruby syntax.
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/
Another great easy to follow tutorial
Lastly just try out some code.
Good luck!
I enjoyed Ruby on Rails for .NET Developers
How quick you can jump ships is really dependent on how fast you pick up the Ruby language and a new IDE. If you already know MVC and ActiveRecord you'll probably fly right along.
Heroku is really really really cool. Definitely try it out.
Welcome to the rails world :) !
Here is some links that may interest you :
There is a fun way to learn : railsforzombies.org
You can watch great screencast at : railscasts.com
You can find a free book here it is very complete : railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book
I also found this : www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1816/top-ruby-on-rails-tutorials
There should be a lot more.
Have fun !
Ya right of now Ruby on Rails 3 is so proper among RoR developer. so get update on it.
Beginning Rails 3 - http://apress.com/book/view/9781430224334
Agile web development Rails 3 - http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with-rails
These two books are rocking new learning and making a step on RoR.
and if u want video tutorial,
go for Railscasts and Teachmecode
What ruby based forum software would you recommend for integration into an existing rails application and allows single sign-on? I have seen many suggestions in posts for forum software that is no longer maintained (2008 and earlier).
Beast is the most current one I know of, and I'm sure it's the one you are referencing.
The rest is more of a side note, but, when I first got into rails, i asked similar questions, aka, what is the best blog, cms, forum, etc to use? As it turns out, the Rails community as a whole is interested in use cases that fit outside the plug-n-play web apps, so most people will end up rolling their own to fit their needs exactly if they find occasion to build such an app in Rails. The good news is that I think that I remember hearing that beast is like 800 lines of code, so it can't been too burdensome to either upgrade out of 2.2ish rails or just copy over the logic you need for your forum.
Thredded is very actively maintained!
Thredded is a Rails engine, so it is very easy to integrate it into an existing app.
http://github.com/radar/rboard
Rboard is really pretty awesome. :)
I always refer to Ruby Toolbox on what the rails comunity prefers.
Here's a good reference http://ruby-toolbox.com/categories/forum_systems.html
Based on the list there are two projects
Rboard - last commit 25 days ago
altered_beast - last commit 12 months ago
I agree with Jed Schneider, in the end most rails guys will roll out their own to fit the exact needs.
Forem and Discourse look promising:
https://github.com/radar/forem
https://github.com/discourse/discourse
Great ruby on rails examples of almost real world applications:
Can somebody give some links of sites that have such codes using the best practices in structure, implementing it, models, controllers, security, views, caching, modularizing and so on? thanks
You could start with guides.rubyonrails.org. They have a lot of information on there. A very good example to start with. Start with the Getting Started link. There are also a lot of other examples on that site.
The next step you might be better off buying a book on this subject. I purchased Simply Rails 2 by Patrick Lenz. Also a very good starter book with good examples. He walks you through an app that's similar to Digg. This will get you into the Model-View-Controller mind set.
If you want to go further, I would suggest Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson. I would suggest the PDF because I use it as a reference and searching within the 774 pages is helpful to say the least. This is my favorite but definitely not a starter book. It's broken into two halves. The first half is a tutorial on how to write a shopping cart. With this example you get into the database models, migrations, sessions, helpers, ajax, routes, security - shows you how to create your own authentication process and more. The second half of the book is more of a reference guide and goes into greater depth than the application tutorial.
From here I would look into plugins to help you out. Search on www.github.com. They host a lot of the open source plugins available. Don't go too wild on plugins because too many will defeat the principles of being RESTful. For security/authentication I would reccomend Authlogic. I still think it's beneficial to go through the tutorial on how to create your own authentication (from the Agile Web Development with Rails book) to see what actually goes into this plugin.
Lastly, but not the least bit important is to start thinking about how you will deploy your app. You may think this is trivial but the longer you put it off, the harder it will become. Look into capistrano and deprec gems (plugins) to deploy onto a VPS. I've had numerous problems deploying to a shared host.
Don't start with the most complicated part of rails like I did. Work from the guides first and get into more complicated apps. Rails has a pretty steep learning curve.
Hope this helps.
Found your post while I was looking for the same thing, this blog post was useful:
http://blog.chrislowis.co.uk/2010/05/31/five-rails-apps-to-study-and-learn-from.html
The Real World Rails repo brings 100+ (and growing) active, open source Rails apps together in one repository using git submodules.
You can clone the collected codebases and learn from Rails apps written by experienced developers. You’ll find all the codebases in the apps/ subdirectory.
Apps you'll find there include Discourse, Diaspora, GitLab, Hound, Rails Contributors, and the Ruby Gems web site.