Rails Resources

The Rails Beginner Cheat sheet isn't a substitution for a tutorial or other resources. It is meant to complement other resources and help you. This page is aimed at showing you more in depth guides to Ruby and Rails. The resources here have a couple of things in common: They are free and suitable for beginners!

Recommended resources

A list of recommended resources to learn Ruby and Rails. If you know a tutorial you think should absolutely be in this list, please say so! Feedback is always welcome!

  • Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book One of the best Ruby on Rails tutorials out there - almost unbelievable that it's free. Michael Hartl leads you through the whole process of setting up Ruby on Rails, teaches you the basics of Ruby and then develops a Twitter like Web application with you. All of this with Test Driven Development. It’s also how I learned Rails ;-).
  • RailsCasts Ryan Bates makes an awesome job of shortly explaining Ruby on Rails features or introducing gems (= little bundles of functionality) via awesome screen casts. Often he takes you step by step through the journey of accomplishing a specific task. his is how a lot of developers learn about cool gems or features.
  • JumpstartLab tutorials JumpstartLab does Ruby and Ruby on Rails trainings and workshops. They share all their material for free online! They also have a list with more specific topics. Awesome!
  • Ruby on Rails Guides Here you can find the official guides covering basically everything about Rails ranging from beginner topics to more advanced topics.
  • Codecademy A great interactive place to learn about JavaScript, basics of web pages (HTML + CSS), Python and of course Ruby. The site is very interactive, so you get straight to the exercises right in your browser. Plus you can track your progress and earn badges. I love badges, don't you?

A Curated Path

This path of getting into Ruby and Rails is brought to you Blair Anderson and is a series of resources suitable for getting you started!

  1. Nitrous Online Development Environment

    If you're having trouble with your ruby environment, look into Nitrous, it allows you to create rails applications in your web browser

  2. JumpStartLab Tutorial for Making your First App

    This tutorial requires zero prior knowledge of rails, and roughly explains the inner workings of rails. It also starts into git/github

  3. Watch some Railscasts

    Railscasts are very popular screencasts for learning ruby and rails. Typically if you need to learn something about rails, you can find a railscast to explain how to do it.

  4. Learn About Ruby

    After getting a basic intro to rails, we'd suggest spending some time specifically on ruby. Codecademy does a good job of teaching basic lessons, bring this knowledge back to your rails apps.

  5. Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial

    The Michael Hartl book is a deep dive for beginners and will give you a great understanding of rails.

  6. Capybara Railscast and Rspec and BDD tutorial

    After understanding rails, its important to understand writing strong applications through testing. We highly recommend learning how to test your ruby code with Rspec (or Minitest) and Capybara.

More Resources

Of course there are other sites out there providing a curated list of resources. Here are some of those pages, where you can find even more resources: