Ruby on Rails: it came in 2007, and now, it has hit the mainstream web frameworks. Large websites you can think of, are also based on Ruby on Rails like Github, Shopify, Yammer, Twitter and many more. It is relatively easy to start with it as it creates a lot of magic for you behind the scenes, and you – the developer – have to write very less code, but if you are a kind of a person who really takes deep interest in knowing how exactly the things work under the hood, you have to take the next step and go beyond the introductory stuff.
In this article, we shall discuss a few intermediate level resources for leveraging the true power of Rails. So let’s get started:
1. Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide:
Rails is written in Ruby, so if you want to best understand Rails, you will have to first find your way through Ruby. Ruby – an interpreted language comes packed with a lot of functionality and supports a lot of modern language concepts. So this book that nearly consists of 900 pages, best explains what you need to know about Ruby in order to dive into the internals of Rails.
2. The Rails 4 way:
It is the most advanced book out there to learn all you need to know about Rails. It dives deep into every aspect of Rails, be it ActiveRecord, Routing, ActionController, or even Configuration, this book explains these concepts best along with examples and code. If you are thinking to contribute to Rails, this book is the first step to open that door for you. Remember, by no means this book is for beginners; it assumes that you already have sufficient knowledge about Rails, and starts right at the next level.
3. Codeschool Ruby Path:
If you best understand something by watching a video and doing an exercise after it, Codeschool is a perfect place for you. It offers courses on the basics of Rails, but most of the courses belong to either intermediate or advance level. Not only this, it also covers writing test code for your Rails projects, and dives into RSpec: the popular testing framework out there. It also provides a course called Rails 4: Zombie Outlaws if you want to quickly discover what’s new in Rails 4. So packaged with awesome coding exercises, and beautiful fantasy themes, it is way easy to learn something at Codeschool than on any other video tutorial site, it’s a worth giving a shot.
4. Ruby on Rails guides:
Rails guides provided by Rails community where one can always find the latest stuff about Rails. Contributed by hundreds of professional writers and Rails programmers, Rails Guides is the best reference out there. Not only it covers the intermediate stuff related to Rails, but it goes for very advance stuff like Getting started with Engines and The Rails Initialization Process. This page also includes the links to release notes, so if you are eager to know what’s changed in a minor/major release for Rails, it is a perfect place to check out.
5. Tutsplus Ruby and Rails courses:
Last, but not least: Tutsplus provides a huge collection of Ruby on Rails courses. As of this writing, this video tutorial site contains 40+ courses that dive into different aspects of Ruby and Rails. You will find everything that you need to know to successfully deploy an app to a production server. This site also covers topics such as Heroku, Ruby core libraries, Building a Rails like framework and much more. So if you want to be a top-notch full-stack Rails developer, tutsplus may be what you are exactly looking for.
So this was a short-list of resources to get you better at Rails. Something missing, or you got something to add, let us know about that in the comments section right below this article and like always happy learning! 🙂
