Learn First?

[BScott]

Hello, all

I'm new to Ruby and I purchased both Agile books for learning Ruby &
Rails. I don't know If I should learn Ruby first or dive into Rails?

 

[Mohit Sindhwani]

Hello, all

I'm new to Ruby and I purchased both Agile books for learning Ruby &
Rails. I don't know If I should learn Ruby first or dive into Rails?

I think you will receive very varied responses to this - some will say
Ruby and others will say Rails. The way I did it was to learn a very
little bit of Ruby first (enough so that the language made some sense),
then went to AWDWR and learnt Rails to start getting productive.

After that, I revisited Ruby to expand the power of what my applications
could do. Finally, I revisited Rails to get into more advanced Rails
topics.

I think it's the Agile Process - one then the other, then the one, then
the other...

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Mohit.
9/5/2007 | 3:10 PM.

 

[Trans]

Hello, all

I'm new to Ruby and I purchased both Agile books for learning Ruby &
Rails. I don't know If I should learn Ruby first or dive into Rails?

Maybe do both with David's book, Ruby for Rails.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932394699/bookstorenow600-20

T.

 

[Gregory Seidman]

Hello, all

I'm new to Ruby and I purchased both Agile books for learning Ruby &
Rails. I don't know If I should learn Ruby first or dive into Rails?

If you know how to program in at least one other language, learn Ruby
first. If you don't know how to program in some other language, get Chris
Pine's excellent Learn to Program (which teaches in Ruby), then learn Ruby
well (e.g. from the pickaxe book).

Once you know Ruby solidly, you are ready to not just learn Rails but to
use it effectively. If you start with Rails without knowing how to program
in Ruby you may eventually make it to strong competence in both Ruby and
Rails, but you will have produced hundreds of lines of code that
will/should embarrass you on the way (and heaven forbid they actually go
into production somewhere).

--Greg

 

[Thomas Worm]

Hello, all

I'm new to Ruby and I purchased both Agile books for learning Ruby &
Rails. I don't know If I should learn Ruby first or dive into Rails?

It depends.

"Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails" contains a very nice tutorial
at the beginning. If you only have a few problems understanding the code
there, and you know the basic concepts of classes and objects etc. from
other languages, feel free to start with rails.

But since Ruby and its concepts are somehow different, you should have
the pickaxe-book on your desk too, to read one or another chapter, when
needed. You will need this book anyway, so buy it.

If you are new to programming at all or to object oriented programming,
you will not really understand, what "Agile Web Development with Ruby on
Rails" is about. Try to learn Ruby first.

Thomas