Learning Ruby on Rails with Pragmatic book

Question

I only have a background knowledge of java and C, and a bit of unix (learned from the first year Comp Sci) and i do know bit about HTML/CSS... anyways so i've started using the book and the book said that we don't need to know html or ruby or css and that book would be kinda teaching all that as we go along..

And i'm at the part where we create a cart for the online store website, but i find that they just add a ton of html/css of ruby codes without really talking about it, and moving on.. I heard that this book was the best of there for ruby, i just focus on the stuff they mention, but i was wondering if i'm supposed to actually just look at other stuff when they add the CSS or HTML tags or ruby codes... i feel that this book is flying, without much explanation..

Should i just keep going with the book, or go back and study every line of all those codes they just put in the program?

Answer 1

I would study the code thoroughly. I think you'll find that (if you keep working at it) ROR is pretty amazing.

Answer 2

The HTML/CSS should be easy to pick up, but if you're having trouble following the Ruby code, I'd suggest you start with a Ruby off-Rails book. The Pickaxe book comes to mind. You can find the 1st edition online. Also the Ruby Way helped me to "get" the Ruby way of doing things.

Answer 3

I think your best bet will be to keep going at a steady pace on the book - going into more detail if you get lost, and if necessary grab a snapshot from online to keep pace if you break things.

From there I would start branching out into many of the other excellent resources available. Pragmatic Programmers have a book called Advanced Rails Recipes that I hear is also fairly good.

Since Rails is still moving rather quickly your best bet will likely be, once you have a handle on things, to start following some of the latest news. Ruby Alltop might be a good place to start looking for more resources. I would suggest going through as many Railscasts as you can - they are pretty much the definitive place to pickup Rails concepts quickly.

Answer 4

I've used the this book, is good but as you said they some things lack explanation. Usually the best thing you can do is pretty much use google or stackoverflow to lookup this things that you just don't understand. I was pretty much like you, 0 HTML or Rails, but after 2 weeks of reading code and looking for explanations on the web I can now pretty much understand all of the code, and afterwards everything is pretty straightforward. My best recomendation is that you modify all of the code they give you, this will force you too lookup everything you don't understand. The good thing is that the code on the book is pretty good, and they try to teach you good programming practices on the way so stick to the book.

Answer 5

I would continue with the book, it really is good. However, you might want to look at some other books as well including (but not limited to) Simply Rails 2 and Learning Rails.

I found the Pragmatic book to be a good start and the other two to complement it rather well. After that, just have some fun digging into some of the internals.

Answer 6

I used this book in my first job and failed miserably. It was my first time and and didn't knew Ruby but was asked by my team leader to just go by this book. And I miserably failed to do anything other than the said methods in the book.

I suggest if you want to t have good grasp at web development, you need to know HTML, CSS and Javascript at a very decent level. After thatstudy Ruby. Then you can go through this book.

Now there was once an article online by a prominent fellow in the rails community saying something worse about this book. But since it isn't online anymore I assume that the blogger realised he was wrong and the book is indeed good. So just go about and find it for yourself. But as I said go through all the other necessary topics I mentioned before you jump into rails.

Answer 7

I would highly recommend supplementing the books with screencasts. Ryan Bates in particular has done an enormous amount of Rails screencasts at Railscasts, which are freely available. He has also done some paid screencasts for the Pragmatic Programmers site which are much more in-depth, and very helpful.

Creating multi-model forms was a bit of an early sticking point for me, and Ryan's Pragmatic Screencast series on forms was very helpful. I would also recommend the ActiveRecord series.

Answer 8

I started Rails when it was 1.3. I followed the second edition of Agile web development with Rails. I was facing hard time finding how the things were happening. As I did not have any experience of web development this was more painful. I followed the book and created the depot application twice but I still did not get very much from this book.

I was having trouble understanding the Ruby code mainly. As said by "listrophy" on #rubyonrails

Using rails without knowing ruby is like trying to write a menu at a chinese restaurant with only an english-chinese dictionary.

You should get yourself up and running with Ruby first only then you should dig into Rails. I highly recommend you the Ruby for Rails book by David Black but for Ruby only. Read part 2 and part 3 only from this book. The things about Rails in this book is crap IMNSHO. When you are done with Ruby from this book, carry on your journey with the Agile rails book.

When you are done with all this, you can check out The Rails Way, The Ruby Way, Pro ActiveRecord books.... The list goes on and on... :)

The depot application in the Agile book is a great example of a sample Rails application. However I suggest you to check out Open Source Rails for some more sample apps. Rails Guides also have some very good tutorials on rails. As said by everyone else Railscasts by Ryan Bates has some very high quality free rails screencasts.

FYI I have a little knowledge about HTML and very little about CSS. You can not learn these technologies by following some book. You will learn these with the experience and time. Although some books can give you a good start. But I do recommend you to learn Javascript-Ajax and stuff. For this purpose you should use libraries like Prototype or Jquery. I recommend Jquery as this is much more easier to learn and also more powerful.

HTH :)