Ruby and Ruby On Rails Learning Resources

Introduction

I recently took some learning time to practice my Ruby and Ruby On Rails skills, with a focus on learning from first principles. We use these tools at the DVLA and I felt the need to sharpen my saw.

Ruby On Rails

First, I worked my way through The Complete Ruby on Rails Developer Course on Udemy.

This course starts with some Ruby basics, and then moves onto Rails. I found it informative and easy to follow, and I recommend it.

It may, however, be too difficult for beginner developers. I think that if you are brand new to software development you should get some experience in the Ruby basics before tackling Rails.

Sololearn

A colleague from the DVLA recommended the Sololearn Ruby course.

It seems to be structured for more experienced developers, and I think that some of the exercises would be tricky for beginners.

That being said, it is an excellent introduction to the core parts of Ruby syntax and I found it to useful for cementing some of the syntactic parts of Ruby after I had worked through using the Udemy course above.

Here is my certificate:

Ruby Koans

Myself and several of my colleagues worked through the Ruby Koans ages ago. I am going to do this again (from the beginning) in the future.

Sandi Metz

I really enjoyed Sandi Metz’s talk All the Little Things. It covers object-oriented and refactoring principles with a specific focus on the Open/Closed principle. She uses Ruby in this talk, and I enjoyed seeing the explanations in the language.

I’ve ordered her book, Practical Object-Oriented Design (POODR), and am looking forward to reading it!

PS: one of my good friends is currently reading Sandi’s other book, 99 Bottles of OOP. He said that it is good refresher on object-oriented concepts that we know but sometimes don’t give enough thought to. I’ve added it to my Goodreads list.

A Note On Pomodoros

I initially found that I wasn’t doing a good job sticking to my study schedule. The method I used to solve this was, unsurprisingly, the pomodoro technique.

I used the Cuckoo timer web app to track my pomodoros. I find that it works well for remote pairing too.