Ruby learning resources for undergrads

General Discussion
1

Hi all,

We’ve got an undergrad who’ll be helping contribute new OOD apps for our site. They have experience with JavaScript, UNIX, and other good skills, but Ruby is new to them. Do you have any good resources to recommend?

As someone who didn’t do any web dev before working on OOD, I took a “learn enough to be dangerous approach” and learned the bare minimum I needed for OOD. For our undergrad, I think we might be doing them a disservice by taking that approach, and I’d rather give them a more solid, transferrable skillset that could help with future jobs or coursework.

My go-to is https://learning.oreilly.com (our library has a site license), but the books and courses I found don’t get around to dynamic webforms and templating with ERBs until pretty late. In the interest of working on our apps, I would like our student to get to that material relatively fast. But in the interest of providing them with a solid foundation, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t try to rush.

Thanks,
Ron Rahaman

Ron Rahaman
Research Scientist II, Research Software Engineer
Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment (PACE)
Open Source Programming Office (OSPO)
Georgia Institute of Technology

2

For Ruby on Rails the best bet to start at are the rails guides:

The official Ruby docs can be found here:
https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/

And if you want a more modern looking doc that works on mobile there’s another doc source here:

Ruby is open source and has an open philosophy on docs, so there are more orgs and people with ruby docs published, but these 2 tend to be the best.

For the actual Rails API you’ll want:
https://api.rubyonrails.org/

And to actually spend some time learning it all and tying it together there’s some good tutorials, though they do have a small cost to access. Below are a couple of the more popular Rails courses:

And

You may run into the same issue of templating and ERB being presented late though, but you can just consult the docs for the ERB class to get a handle of it:
https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/ERB.html
OR
https://rubyapi.org/3.3/o/erb

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