Ruby On Rails Web Application Development From Scratch?!

Question

Background

I am interested in getting to grips with some Ruby On Rails. I've got 4 years experience programming in C#, ASP.Net, ASP.Net MVC, SQL Server and more recently Silverlight etc. Obviously I've got a pretty good understanding about the various implementation routes that you can go down when writing web applications using C#, the issue is that I have literally no clue about Ruby On Rails, other than that Ruby is an awesome pure object oriented language and that Rails is a very quick way in which to build web applications using Ruby.

What I'm After

So essentially I'm after a session that fills in the blanks, and helps me to understand the various ways of building web applications using ROR. On top of this, i've found a few tutorials but they seem to be quite vague, so any documentation/samples would be very handy to help get me started.

More Detail

Popular IDE'S to use for development (I've heard RubyMine is good from JetBrains). Possible database implementations to use (I know MySQL is an option but which version?) Is HTML/CSS used to style the web apps?! Interface plugins if used? General route to producing a highly Web 2.0 site that encompasses a fantastic user experience and a beautiful interactive interface.

...You get the idea, I just need a bit of guidance getting clued up.

Help greatly appreciated :-D

Answer 1

I'd highly recommend starting by reading:

1. Programming Ruby (also available online)
2. Agile Web Development with Rails

You should start with the first one, but don't read it all the way through. Once you get the basics of Ruby down, you can switch to the Rails book, but feel free to switch back and forth as you get more familiar with both Ruby and Rails.

The books are both very well written, and they're actually fun to read as far as technical books go. They do a great job of explaining the basics to a total newbie and also really digging in deep. You'll have all of your initial questions answered within a few hours.

Answer 2

When I tried to get into Rails, I bought this Rails for .NET Developers. It was quite useful to get going. After that, the most value I found was watching railscast videos.

For an IDE, I use Netbeans.

Answer 3

Different people learn different ways, but one thing I find to be very helpful for getting a real "feel" for Ruby on Rails is screencasts. The Rails site has a whole section devoted to screencasts. For example, with the 15-minute-blog video, you can actually watch someone work on the blog app and see all the steps along the way. It's not necessarily more informative than, say, a book, but it can be easier to grasp when you're actually seeing it.

Answer 4

The official Rails Guides are kept well up to date -- begin with the Getting Started guide, Railscasts provide quick how-tos on lots of common tasks, and the Agile Web Development with Rails (3rd Edition) book is excellent if you want to sit down and read how it all works.

There's also tons of sample code on GitHub, where you'll find just about all the plugins available as well as lots of well-designed Rails apps that will show you all the best practices.