Ruby Resources

This is my list of recommended resources for new Ruby and Rails programmers. Or even old ones.

Web Sites

There are a lot of Ruby and Rails-related web sites and blogs out there. Here are a few that I find useful, especially for beginners.

  • The Ruby Home Page is a good place to start to learn about the language, the community, news and upcoming events, and all things Ruby.
  • Likewise, the Ruby on Rails Home Page includes a number of valuable resources, including the now-famous screencasts that helped to jump-start Rails acceptance.
  • Ruby-Doc.org collects all kinds of documentation about Ruby, including comprehensive documentation for the core and standard libraries.
  • Ruby Inside is Peter Cooper’s portal site for Ruby and Rails news.
  • Ruby Quiz is a weekly programming challenge for Ruby programmers. You can see archives of previous Ruby quizzes (along with their solutions) at the web site. There’s also a book that collects some of the best quizzes.
  • Nuby on Rails is Geoffrey Grosenbach’s Ruby on Rails site for newbies.
  • Ryan Bates hosts free weekly screencasts featuring Ruby on Rails tips and tricks, at Railscasts.
  • The PeepCode screencasts aren’t free, but they are highly recommended as a way to learn Rails.
  • RubyLearning offers a free online course in Ruby programming (as well as courses on other related topics).

Books

These books are widely considered to be some of the best on Ruby and Rails programming.

  • Programming Ruby (2nd ed.), Dave Thomas [Look]
  • The Ruby Way (2nd ed.), Hal Fulton [Look]
  • Agile Web Development with Rails (2nd ed.), Dave Thomas et al [Look]
  • The Well-Grounded Rubyist, David Black [Look]
  • Ruby Cookbook, Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson [Look]
  • Rails Cookbook, Rob Orsini [Look]

Training

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

You’ll find that many Ruby and Rails developers eschew heavyweight IDEs in favor of powerful editors like Vim, Emacs and TextMate. I am one of those people. Nevertheless, there are now a lot of good choices for more comprehensive IDEs, and you may find that one of them suits you better. Here are a few IDEs that I know of.

  • Aptana RadRails is an Eclipse-based IDE for Ruby on Rails. It’s available both as a standalone application and as a plugin for Eclipse 3.2.
  • NetBeans 6.0 Beta has what I’m told is excellent support for Ruby.
  • ActiveState’s Komodo Edit is a free, multi-language editor for dynamic languages and Ajax technologies.