Ask HN: Where is the best place to learn Ruby?

9 points by GoofyGewber 14 years ago | 19 comments

I've been trying to lean Ruby, and I can't find any good tutorials. Anyone have any (Free?) tutorials they recommend?

fananta 14 years ago |

Did you mean Ruby itself? or RoR? For the latter, the Michael Hartl Ruby on Rails Tutorial is pretty good: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/beginning

GoofyGewber 14 years ago | |

Well, you're suppose to learn Ruby before Ruby on Rails right? Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

zampano 13 years ago | | |

Honestly, if you're planning on focusing on Rails eventually, I'd start with the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl (http://ruby.railstutorial.org). It's easy to get lost as a total beginner with all the various things Ruby itself is capable of, when you might have better results focusing on a smaller subset of the whole, at least to start. Rails tutorial also has a chapter early on (one of the first five) that contains an intro to ruby and can point you in the right direction from there.

Book-wise, you can't go wrong with The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Grounded-Rubyist-David-Black/...) to begin with. I found it a lot more approachable than the Pickaxe book early on.

Good luck, Ruby was my first language and I learned a lot about learning programming languages from that experience.

glimcat 13 years ago | | |

If you have previous programming experience, I don't think that it matters much. You can always look stuff up as you go if you already know enough to know what you're looking for.

sparknlaunch12 14 years ago |

Stackoverflow is a great resource. The link below is has details on Rails (maybe not best starting point for Ruby) but helpful site to learn and find good resources.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55574/learning-ruby-on-ra...

damian2000 13 years ago |

Highly recommend this free 5 week Coursera course out of UC Berkeley. All development is in Ruby and Rails. There is some introductory Ruby material - you don't need to have any prior knowledge. It started last week, but you can join late without a problem.

https://www.coursera.org/course/saas

Oh yeah the optional textbook that goes with it is available on kindle for $10.

GoingKerouac 13 years ago | |

I enrolled today.

I wonder what the intentions of these universities are by offering these courses for free. (seriously) hm...

It might just be me being a pessimist, but they have to have some kind of evil motive, right? It seems unheard of that any university offers something for free.

Found this article about Coursera... http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/18/net-us-usa-college...

I guess I'll just enjoy it while it lasts.

For the OP I'd suggest why's guide http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/chapter-1.htm...

GoofyGewber 13 years ago | |

Thank you!

Sodaware 14 years ago |

If you're wanting to learn Ruby on Rails, I highly recommend http://railscasts.com/

GoofyGewber 14 years ago | |

Thank you!

camwiese 13 years ago |

Boom. All you need right here : http://mattangriffel.com/post/15243700892/on-learning-to-cod...

gr2020 14 years ago |