Learning Ruby (on Rails)
Most of my programming career has revolved around Microsoft technologies, starting with Visual Basic 3, up through the various versions to VB.Net, then switching to CSharp shortly after DotNet came out of beta.
I think I know the MS development stack fairly well and I like the direction they are moving in with the likes of MVC3 and Razor, Nuget etc. but it seems a fair amount of this ‘direction’ may be coming from the Rails community.
I have decided to give myself 2 weeks to ‘learn’ Rails, although I may get distracted by the Christmas holidays (and the fact that we will have an extra 6 kids and 3 adults staying with us for 2 weeks) and will record some of it here.
I have done a little research in preparation and bought a couple of ebooks from the prags:
They seem to be considered ‘definitive’ and cover the current versions of Rails (3.0.3) and Ruby (1.9.2).
The only other purchase I am likely to make is an IDE or editor. I code on a Mac, even when using Visual Studio so I have a few more options than most Windows users. The recommendation seems to be that, if you are on Windows, install a Linux VM for Ruby development. The favourite environment for the Mac looks to be Textmate although there are a few IDEs available such as JetBrain’s RubyMine and Aptana Studio, both of these are available for Windows, OS x, and Linux. I am a fan of JetBrain’s Resharper so will try RubyMine, the trial is 30 days so no need to make a purchase decision yet.
Other references that I expect to find useful over the next 2 weeks are: