Timur Vafin and me (Oleg Kurnosov) will be posting RubyOnRails-related articles here, for those who is not too much aware of it yet, here is what to start with:

So, decided to learn more about RubyOnRails and don’t know what to start with?

It seems that the most straightforward way - is to take some completed RubyOnRails-based project and dig into it, trying to understanding something.

However it’s wrong and dangerous parth….although it takes you to some kind of positive learning result (tryed it out already)

Instead it’s more logical to start learning RubyOnRails framework from learning the Ruby-language and basics. Following is a must to read:

• PickAxe
• it’s good to start with funny book Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (it also had Russian translation fortunately)
• For wikipedia fans

While learning, following will help you:

• Knowing Perl basic
  For example many get confused by the following construction:

  
  # surfed through the array of objects and collected new array
  out of .name, on-fly making it more hum (this is RoR)
  some_array.collect { |item| item.name.humanize }
  

• Understanding of Object Oriented Programming (OOP), i.e. not only understanding, but understanding that OOP is good
  It doesn’t really matter if you don’t know Perl and PHP, however it you don’t know why using OOP, it would be quite hard to figure out things. In fact, it’s very popular to develop using PHP procedures-way, isn’t?

When you learn the basics of Ruby, write couple of scripts, and then it’s the right time to learning the framework finally!

There is also a super-book Agile Web Development with Rails, where it’s also explained how to create a sample e-commerce application.

OK, now it’s time to dig into the code of RubyOnRails projects to learn from the others!