If you’re a beginning Ruby dev, this post is for you. We have polled seven experts in the Ruby community — developers who have come highly recommended and respected by their peers.
This is the advice they give specifically to new Ruby developers. We hope you find it useful, encouraging and enjoyable.
If you’re a seasoned pro or an intermediate Rubyist, stay tuned. We’ve got lots more where this came from, and our seven experts have got tips, tricks and code snippets for you, too.
In an e-mail exchange, he told us new Ruby devs should “start building something and get it released to GitHub as soon as possible.
“You don’t have to have a new or exciting idea to implement. When you are learning, just build stuff that has been done before. Build a scaled down version of Twitter. Or reimplement a blog.”
Crocker says he once ported a PHP-built job board to Rails — a thoroughly educational experience.
He continued, “I’d recommend finding a project that looks interesting on OpenSourceRails.com and getting up and running locally (and the tests functional). Then try adding a few new features to it. And get it upgraded to the latest Rails version while fixing the dependencies.
“Jumping straight into development work without experience will definitely be difficult and frustrating. However the amount of learning you’ll receive will be enormous… Making yourself suffer through the pain of a new environment will help you learn faster than you ever thought possible.”
He advises newer Ruby developers, “Don’t be intimidated. Take advantage of the very many robust community resources that exist, and make connections with community members through open source. The Ruby ecosystem is hungry for new developers, and if you make your mark, you won’t go jobless for very long.”
In fact, Katz says the community itself is one of the strongest points of the Ruby language. “Even though most of the web development community is focused around the Rails framework, there are standalone libraries for just about everything, like virtually every new NoSQL database and connectivity with services like Twitter and Facebook.
“There’s a spirit of experimentation in the Ruby community that makes it extremely strong.”
He said, “Don’t try to bring over your old idioms and patterns, because they’ll just weigh you down.
“When I came over to Ruby from Java, my first instinct was to try recreating a bunch of concepts and architectural patterns that I already knew, such as dependency injection, instead of learning new ones more appropriate to Ruby. If you’re coming from a statically typed language like I did, you might have some trouble letting go of the perceived security of type constraints.
“There’s like this whole Zen aspect of working with Ruby where you have to let go of trying to exercise control over every possible interface for your objects.”
He also echoes Katz’s statements about the Ruby community. “We’ve got this amazing, creative and hard-working global community of people working to make Ruby the most enjoyable environment. There is no big commercial vendor getting all capitalistic on us and causing problems like you see with Oracle and Microsoft and their developer communities. Almost everything that gets done in our space, 99% is done for open-source love and passion and because it is useful to the person doing it.”
For beginning Ruby devs, Bates recommended, “You can learn a lot by asking questions, and you can learn even more by contributing, yourself.
“With every problem you run into, there are many others who will likely run into the same thing. When you find a solution, write about it to help others and to get feedback on better solutions. We’re all learning.”
Bates takes his own advice, as well, by contributing to sites like Rails Forum.
Disclosure: Mashable‘s features editor, Josh Catone, is the co-founder of Rails Forum.
She said the thing that helped her most in her study and use of the Ruby programming language was “pairing with other masters of the language.” Since not everyone who wants to learn Ruby has one-on-one access to the masters, however, she has a few suggestions for beginning devs.
“I would also suggest reading books like The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton and Programming Ruby, a.k.a. The Pickaxe Book, by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt.
“If Ruby happens to be the first language you are ever learning I would suggest Learn To Program by Chris Pine. My sister is a nurse who has never done any programming whatsoever and she was able to use this book to learn the fundamentals of programming and she did so at a remarkably fast pace.”
She came to us with a list of specific steps and tools for new developers.
“I would suggest reading Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide (The Pickaxe Book) in order to get familiar with Ruby.
“For Rails-specific stuff, I’d highly recommend Railscasts as starting point. Pick a fun project; complete the Getting Started with Rails tutorial; and deploy it to Heroku.
“After completing these three steps, you’re going to be having so much fun and getting lots of things done that there won’t be coming back.”
For beginners, he writes, “Ruby is a very powerful language… it is natural that when you start your first project, you get carried away by the productivity the language gives you and don’t worry about Ruby’s best practices.
“My advice is to control a little this initial amazement and read up on Ruby best practices. Ruby is an object-oriented programming language, so the knowledge of features like encapsulation and inheritance and principles like single responsibility are extremely important to have.
Valim also advises new Ruby devs to not leave testing out of the picture. “Ruby ships with a built-in test framework, and there are several others available as open source, all with plenty of documentation and books. It will reduce your productivity at the beginning, but it definitely pays off withs well-tested, organized and readable code.”
If you’re new to Ruby and you have a question, feel free to drop it in the comments! Our panelists are likely to stop by with more feedback.
Likewise, if you’re a more experienced Ruby dev and you feel like answering questions or passing on some great advice of your own, please leave a comment and school us all.
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