RoR beginner - what are the topics to concentrate on?

Question

I'm a beginner to Ruby and RoR. I went through a book (railsspace) which covers the basics. I understand the basics of how RoR works, REST etc.

Beyond this, I'm not sure how to proceed. In short, my questions are

1. What topics should I concentrate on, to grow as a RoR programmer?
2. I checked quite a few books, didn't fully like many of them. Could you suggest a couple of books that really helped you learn RoR? (I understand that this is subjective)
3. What do recruiters look for, when they are trying to fill a RoR position?
4. Could you suggest an open source project, that will help me learn my concepts better, and also teach me best RoR coding practices? (coming from PHP, I find RoR beautiful and sometimes intimidating)

Thanks...

Answer 1

1. The best way to learn is by doing. Create your own rails app. You could go with one of the common ones: recipe site, blog, etc, or else design something you'd really want to use.
2. As far as books go, Agile Web Development with Rails is a good one, especially for beginners.
3. Experience. A lot of people claim to know Rails, but they can't tell you anything more than scaffolding up a basic model. Get good with the AJAX, know some of the tricky details of ActiveRecord, that sort of thing. Also, Rails is still in that stage where things change frequently between versions (and it looks like 3.0 is going to be another big one), so you have to stay current.
4. What you probably need to do is learn Ruby first; there are some idioms that baffle newcomers. There's nothing stopping you from learning it at the same time you learn Rails, but have something handy to help you.

Answer 2

1. Two-part answer:

   1. Become proficient in Ruby.

   2. Steep yourself in the community - learn the top-tier plugins, see how smarter people are solving problems with Rails, learn about upcoming features and why they're needed.

2. O'Reilly's Head First book on Rails is outstanding for beginners. A great compliment to the Pragmatic Programmer's Agile Web Development With Rails.

3. Whatever the client has asked for? =^) The usual buzzwords, plus experience (which is always the rub when you're trying to do something new).

4. Try looking through GitHub's repositories. The Bort project might be a good, incremental approach to this.