I’m concentrating on learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I’ve been learning a lot about Ruby on Rails, but I need to fasten my speed of learning. Here is my plan.
- Follow Ruby Cookbook to review String, Numbers, Date, Time, Arrays, Hashes, Code Blocks, Iteration, Objects and Classes
- Follow Programming Ruby and complete the tutorial in Part 1.
- Follow Programming Ruby and read through Part 2.
- Follow Rails for PHP Developers and complete the instruction.
- Learn about finder methods in ActiveRecord.
- Learn about every validate method in ActiveRecord (plus ActiveRecord:Errors)
- Go through helpers especially form-related helpers.
- Make a depot app in Agile Web Development with Rails using Rails 2.0.
- Read Part 3 in the book above to get a deeper understanding of Rails framework.
- Learn a bit about Ajax and Rails.
- Learn REST and new routings in Rails.
- Learn Testing in Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
- Learn a bit about RSpec.
I decided to spend less time on Ajax, caching and deployment. My time is limited, so I need a trade-off. What I really need first is to be more fluent with use of forms, validations and model relationships (one to many, many to many and so forth). I don’t spend a lot in #1 to #3. Understanding one language fully isn’t possible, but following #1 to #3 will give me an overview. (I never get Proc stuff.) #5 to #7 is the most important. Finishing these will give me a good start. Around the time when I work on #8, I will start to create my new app that uses many of the Rails features. I’m not sure how much time is available for #10 to #12. During the learning, I will take notes, and build my own cheat sheets and TextMate snippets. After all of this, I will have more time on Ajax, Web Service, Rails plugins, i18n, popular gems, caching and deployment.
Note: I now use Rails 2.0.