[LRUG] Beginning Rails in 2012

[Tom Armitage]

So: I've been using Rails since god, pre 1.0, I think. Not very well,
mind, but a while, nontheless.

I'm thinking at the moment about where to begin explaining it to new
users (in particular: programmers who are very technically competent,
perhaps with a CS background, but no direct experience of Ruby or
Rails).

And, looking at Rails 3.2 in 2012... I realise I have no idea where to
begin. A lot of what I've learned is stored as diffs on top of "the
old way of doing things"; it makes sense because I started learning it
years ago.

But where would you send a competent programmer in 2012 looking to
start from scratch with Rails? My usual recommendation has always been
getting a good grasp on Ruby, perhaps through The Ruby Way or the (at
the time) excellent Ruby For Rails, which helped me understand the
language loads, though I fear it now may have dated/be irrelevant.

Where, say, would you point as a starting point for testing/BDD in
Ruby, given "four years of the mailing list and user group" isn't
enough?

I'm curious, because every now and then I look at Rails as an outsider
and roll my eyes a bit...

t.