[LRUG] Beginning Rails in 2012

[Sidu Ponnappa]

+1 for starting with Ruby, not Rails, and +1 for "The Ruby Way."
Gregory "seacreature" Brown's "Ruby Best Practices" is an excellent
follow-up to "The Ruby Way." "Refactoring: Ruby Edition" is also a
nice read.

For TDD/BDD, your best bet would be to find someone that does it and
pair program. The folks at ThoughtWorks (disclosure: I used to work
there) are very friendly and organise plenty of dev events that should
make this possible.

In the absence of said pair programming option, the original TDD book
is still my favourite - Kent Beck's "Test Driven Development: By
Example." It uses Java, but if the point is learning TDD, the language
is orthogonal. Additionally, trying to get a patch/pull request
accepted to the RSpec or Minitest projects is an excellent way to
learn the currently accepted conventions in the TDD/BDD world.

You could also try out http://rubymonk.com - it teaches Ruby using
tests. (disclosure: we built this).

Regards,
Sidu Ponnappa.
CEO, C42 Engineering.
http://twitter.com/ponnappa


On 15 March 2012 23:31, Tom Armitage <tom at infovore.org> wrote:
> 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.
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