Best Book Acording to yoUR Experience

[Sahil Reddy]

Hello Savvy pals

I want to learn RUBY and RUBY on RAILS.
Could you please suggest me best book for each, essentially for beginers.

Moreover, i love HEAD FIRST SERIES....and it has one title HEAD FIRST RAILS....But someone told me that it is of no use because now we have RAILS 3.0...What do you suggest ???

Thanks

[Katrina Owen]

I haven't read the Head First Rails book, so I can't comment as to whether or not it is useful despite being about Rails 2 rather than Rails 3.

My guess is that it would still teach you a lot of what you need. My favorite books for ruby come from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Here's what I'd suggest in order to learn ruby:

1. Download the ruby koans from http://www.rubykoans.com/ and work your way through them.

2.
a) Work through Chris Pine's book "Learn to Program" if you're a beginner.
http://pragprog.com/titles/ltp2/learn-to-program

b) Work your way through "programing with ruby" if you're comfortable with programming, just never wrote ruby.
http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9

3. Work your way through "Agile Development with Rails" 4th edition (beta)
http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with-rails

4. Work your way through "The RSpec Book"
http://pragprog.com/titles/achbd/the-rspec-book

At any point above, go find interesting projects on github and read the code. If you want a blog, find a ruby open source code base and customize it to your needs. Etc.

Best of luck,
Katrina

[Sahil Reddy]

That was the best reply i have ever got from someone.

Thanks a lot Katrina !!!

Could you please suggest me just "One book to Buy " that would work for "Ruby on Rails "

Thanks and Regards
:-)

[Katrina Owen]

I hesitate to suggest "just one book" but I think that for Ruby on Rails, this will get you pretty far:

3. Work your way through "Agile Development with Rails" 4th edition (beta)
http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with-rails

Mind you... if you don't know ruby, you risk running into confusion between what bits are ruby and what bits are rails, and a lot of things in rails will seem very mysterious... like magic. That said -- there are enormous amounts of tutorials and help available online, so it's certainly possible to just go ahead and start.

Also, Chris Pine's book actually started out as a tutorial online, and it is still available at his website, here:
http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/

So my revised suggestion is:

1. rubykoans.com (free)
2. Chris Pine's online version of his tutorial (free)
3. Agile Development with Rails, 4th edition (worth every penny)
4. Have fun, and read LOTS of code on github!

[Sahil Reddy]

Thankyou so much Katrina......

:-)
:-)
:-)

[Sahil Reddy]

Just few more Questions

1. Which latest version of Ruby is going on ???
2. Are there major differences between Rails 2 and Rails 3.
3. Which IDE would you suggest for Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Thanks and Regards

[Katrina Owen]

The latest stable version of ruby is 1.9.2

Ruby on Rails 3 is a big change from version 2.

There is very little automatic tool support for ruby, so in terms of IDE there isn't much to suggest.

A lot of people use TextMate, some people use RubyMine. I'm sure there are others.

I personally just use vim with a bunch of plugins and macros.

[Rahul Chandran]

Head First Rails is good even though it teaches you rails 2 you have to make some tweaks to work in Rails 3 platform.
You can use the Aptana studio IDE for rails.

[Greg Charles]

There are some good reviews of Ruby books in The Bunkhouse, including my own review of my favorite of all (one) of the Ruby books I've read.