RailsTutorial-cover-webTowards the end of the Getting Started with Rails guide, there was a link to the Ruby on Rails Tutorial. I had missed it the first time I went through the Getting Started guide, but when I reviewed the guide a second time (things made a lot more sense) I noticed and decided to check it out.

I'm very glad that I did!

For the most part, this book (available as paper edition, but the author had made it freely readable online on the web site) was exactly what I had hoped to find for Ruby on Rails. The book went through the process of making a Rails app three times, in exactly the progression I wanted:

First pass: A simple "hello world" that does nothing much but lets the student experience all the standard overhead around creating and deploying a Rails app. It's barely a Rails lesson at all: it's really a lesson for learning the surrounding infrastructure before digging into the meat of learning Rails.

Second pass: A simple "toy app" that does a lot... but the student is rushed through without understanding what's going on behind the scene. It's really a demonstration of what's possible via Rails helpers & scaffolding and less about learning Rails. It reminds me of what the Codecademy Ruby on Rails "class" was like. A lot of incomprehensible fancy flash. However, unlike Codecademy which left me asking "now what?" Rails Tutorial follows up.

Third pass: Over 80% of the book is spent building the "sample app." Starting from a site that can serve a few static pages and grows, bit by bit, into a mini clone of Twitter. It had creation and maintenance of user accounts, authentication, posting 140-character messages, following & un-following users, all the core bits we associate with Twitter. (Which, the author asserted, was also originally built using Ruby on Rails.)

The Codecademy Rails class left me confused and feeling like I've wasted my time. (About a day.)

The Rails Guides left me with a basic level of comprehension of what goes on in a Rails app. My time (About half a week) is well spent, but I didn't feel like I could build anything on my own yet.

After the Ruby on Rails Tutorial (which took me over a week) I feel like I have all the basic tools I need to start playing in the Rails playground. I feel like I have an idea how to get started, how to experiment, understand what the experiment does behind the scenes, and debug whatever goes wrong while I experiment.

And with that, it's time to practice using my new tools: Let's build something!