I would like to think that I have covered Ruby quite extensively here on CodeCondo, some of my most popular posts have been directly related to Ruby. If you’re a Ruby (or Rails) developer, you might find my posts about Ruby IDE’s, Ruby Books, and Ruby Learning Resources to be quite useful, if not – carry on, we’ve got lots to look at.

Last week, the Rails Rumble competition went live for the weekend, and is now in a state of judging – who created the best entry. After spending some time analyzing and viewing the entries, I have to say that Ruby on Rails is capable of a lot more than people might think, even for fast paced projects like the ones you see on Rails Rumble entry list. Did you know about this rumble, and are you going to participate next year?

Now, if you’re looking for some quick guides on Ruby on Rails, I recently stumbled across this great post on Medium – it discusses how to create a jobs board with Ruby on Rails, but it doesn’t assume that you’ve had any previous programming experience, so the whole post includes things like setting up Rails for the first time, as well as how to create projects and the actual first application.

The other resources for Rails that I recommend are this post from Justin Gordon (discussing Rails queries), then there is this one from Jakub Naliwajek (he has listed great amount of Rails resources for learning, and practicing), or this one – a tutorial that shows how to build a simple blog-like system using Ruby on Rails.

1. Learn Ruby on Rails from Scratch

You can stick with books if you like (continue reading), but I know that quite a few people out there prefer to learn using either video courses, or slideshow materials. Today, I’ve got an amazing video course to suggest to you if you’re inclined to learn Ruby on Rails quickly. This series will teach you the basics of Ruby on Rails, while also giving you all the necessary knowledge to help you carry on developing as soon as you finish the course.

As of writing this, there are nearly 9000 unique students who have taken part in this 10 hour course, which also means that once you’ve signed up – you’re granted access to a private forum where the instructor himself can be found as well, it’s one of the best ways to go about learning Ruby on Rails. The best part, you will actually be able to somewhat master the language, removing the need to further research basic and intermediate concepts.

2. A community-driven Rails 3 & 4 style guide

This Rails style guide recommends best practices so that real-world Rails programmers can write code that can be maintained by other real-world Rails programmers. A style guide that reflects real-world usage gets used, and a style guide that holds to an ideal that has been rejected by the people it is supposed to help risks not getting used at all – no matter how good it is.

You should seriously consider adapting to Style Guides, given that they enable to easily carry on the development of software that many people might be contributing to at the same time. You should encourage your team members to agree to certain style guides in order to have the same level of attention towards the apps being written.

3. Ruby on Rails Workshop Guide

How about a full-scale guide and introduction to Ruby on Rails? In this web guide we have the Geekcamp’s staff give us a narrow and concise tutorial on how to master the basics of Rails. The workshop includes seventeen different lessons that will show you: installation of Rails, how Rails work, databases, CRUD, data validation, and many other insights that will leave you wanting for more.

This is the complete text of Objects on Rails, a “developer’s notebook” documenting some guidelines, techniques, and ideas for applying classic object-oriented thought to Ruby on Rails applications. This book is aimed at the working Rails developer who is looking to grow and evolve Rails projects while keeping them flexible, maintainable, and robust. The focus is on pragmatic solutions which tread a “middle way” between the expedience of the Rails “golden path”, and rigid OO purity.

4. Rails Girls Guides

I suppose there is the need to have more women developers be open about their career choices, at the moment – the ratio of women and men working in the computer science field is quite astonishing, with as many as 90% of developing workforce being male! What is the reason behind this, and can we as a collective community do anything about it?

Here we have a nice introductory book on Ruby on Rails from an all-women developer community Rails Girls. Just like you would expect, this book will guide you through the basics of setting up Rails, but also give you some really challenging tasks to do – like building your very own first Rails application. As you progress with the content, more difficult patterns will be introduced.

5. Ruby on Rails 4.0

You could, technically, use this online book as a source of Rails documentation, as there is nearly everything documented under its own subjects and topics, far less convenient than to search on Google every time. As per authors words, Ruby on Rails can be deceiving in terms of being easy to learn, but it is nonetheless one of the nicest frameworks when it comes to building functional web applications.

Free eBooks for Learning Ruby on Rails Framework

You’re on your way to becoming an intermediate programmer, as these resources seem to cover the whole majority of what you need to know in order to begin building your own apps. I was really, pleasantly, surprised by the Rails Girls guide, and while it says it is only for women – of course, men can use their guide too! Will you, though?

If you enjoyed this particular post, please pass it along to your friends or family, you never know who you might inspire to pick up a new skill to learn. Programming is certainly very appealing, but then again – the right mindset is required.