I've been trying to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the past 6 months. I've gone through tryruby.com, rails for zombies, watched many of the RailsCasts, and built a couple apps on my own to learn the language, but I still consider myself a novice.
Sure I can implement many gems into my application and just hack together other peoples work, but I really am gaining no knowledge of the Ruby behind all these gems and have no clue what the best practices for Rails are.
Online materials for Ruby and Rails are always made for different versions of the languages/frameworks and that can make things very complicated at times for someone just starting out.
So what do you recommend to REALLY learn Ruby and Rails?
If you haven't already find the ruby/rails user group in your area. I found that having people locally to ask questions to makes a huge difference.
If you are on linux or mac install RVM to manage versions of ruby and rails. It allows you to install multiple versions of ruby and rails on your system.
Learning Ruby wasnt meant to be easy, if it was everyone would be doing it. I know you mentioned a lot of course from the Envy Labs guys but have you tried codeschool.com yet? I know they just came out with a Zombies 2
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I've been trying to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the past 6 months. I've gone through tryruby.com, rails for zombies, watched many of the RailsCasts, and built a couple apps on my own to learn the language, but I still consider myself a novice.
Sure I can implement many gems into my application and just hack together other peoples work, but I really am gaining no knowledge of the Ruby behind all these gems and have no clue what the best practices for Rails are.
Online materials for Ruby and Rails are always made for different versions of the languages/frameworks and that can make things very complicated at times for someone just starting out.
So what do you recommend to REALLY learn Ruby and Rails?
To really learn Ruby & Rails if you haven't already done it do the rails 3 tutorial http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book. It goes through building a rails app line by line without scaffolding.
For the Ruby try Learn Ruby The Hard Way. http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/
If you haven't already find the ruby/rails user group in your area. I found that having people locally to ask questions to makes a huge difference.
If you are on linux or mac install RVM to manage versions of ruby and rails. It allows you to install multiple versions of ruby and rails on your system.
Welcome to the real world. :-) Google-fu is critical.
That said, things like rvm and rbenv can help with the version problem.
Learning Ruby wasnt meant to be easy, if it was everyone would be doing it. I know you mentioned a lot of course from the Envy Labs guys but have you tried codeschool.com yet? I know they just came out with a Zombies 2