Hey Amos, Welcome! I think you've made a great choice. I still consider myself a semi-new Rubyist (~1.5 years or so) so I can quickly think back to some things I did or books I read when I first started and some things I wish I did better. I mostly relied on books and following people on Twitter to find good links and info. I tried some screencasts but the combination of dry voices, moving slowly and a semi-bad attention span didn't work out for me.
Books: *Learn to Program by Chris Pine* This is a great first book. Don't be confused by the title. Some of the exercises and activities that he has you do at the end of chapters are actually quite hard. It's a quick read and he keep things light and very informative. It's also available for free online: http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ *Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen* This book has about 30 small chapters that cover most of the Ruby idioms and unique features of the language. It follows a format of an introduction to the feature, how you can use it, how to stay out of trouble and how it is used in the wild. I really liked reading this while I was getting acquainted with Rails as a lot of the Rails magic (and other popular gems magic) gets uncovered while you read this book. I certainly remember having a lot of "Aha!" moments. *Agile Web Development with Rails by Sam Ruby & occasional words from DHH* This was the book I learned Rails from. The first third of the book is a whirlwind tour of Ruby. The second third takes you on a tutorial through building a shopping cart type app with a more out-of-the-box Rails stack using Agile methodologies and a (slightly laid back, imo) Test Driven Development along the way. And finally the last third is a deep dive into the main components of Rails (Active Record, Action Dispatch/Controller, and Active View). *Rails 3 in Action by Yehuda Katz & Ryan Bates* This would be an alternative to the above. While I haven't read this, I paged through it before recommending it to a friend that was curious. It seems to follow a more strict adherence to TDD while building a ticketing system app. They use a Rails stack that relies on RSpec and Factory Girl for testing as opposed to the default of TestUnit and Fixtures. This isn 't a bad thing though as you are very likely to run into RSpec and Factory Girl in the wild. Sites: http://rubykoans.com/ This is a neat and fresh take on learning Ruby by way of solving problems by writing tests (which is incredibly important and a hugely stressed thing in the Ruby community). Good luck! Richard On Sunday, December 9, 2012 10:03:54 AM UTC-8, Amos wrote: > > I am a junior student in the UCSD and just attended the last meeting on > the CSE meeting room. > Now I am really eager to learn this cool language. > Can anyone give some suggestions? like some good methods, excellent books, > videos... > Thanks in advance!! > -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
