Want to learn Ruby on Rails? Here’s a tutorial that’s actually fun

I was reading through the top news stories on Y Combinator’s Hacker news this morning and came across an interesting one. There’s a guy who wanted to learn Ruby on Rails, so he decided to build a clone of Medium.com using Ruby on Rails and React and documented the entire experience. The result is a pretty kick ass tutorial that can help anyone learn how to code in Ruby with an actual project rather than going through all the boring basics.

Now as many of you know, I’m a Python guy and I’d probably try to convince you to learn Python instead of Ruby if you were deciding between the two…that being said, I think this is such a fun way to learn Ruby that I felt it was only fair to share it even though Ruby would be my second choice.

If you want to see what it takes to get started, here’s the first video in the series:

Now if you don’t know anything about programming, here’s a quick primer that might help you decide if this particular tutorial will set you on the right path.

  • You’ll hear about two different types of coders, front-end and back-end – Ruby and Python on considered back-end, HTML, CSS and Javascript (usually in combination) are considered front-end
  • C, C++, C# and Java are also back-end languages but over the last few years most people have found that learning Ruby or Python presents an easier path to getting started with back-end programming because you don’t have to worry about memory management
  • Ruby was all the rage about five years ago, since then Python has grown in popularity beyond anyone’s expectations, now there’s talk about making Python the core language that is taught in coding courses

Like I said, I’m not here to convince you not to learn Ruby, but I can’t help but share my bias towards Python. That being said, this tutorial is so much fun that I might just make an exception. So if you’re sitting here on a Saturday thinking, “you know what, I’ve always wanted to learn to code!” Just click play above and get started.

If you’re a reader of mine who is also a developer, what’s your language of choice? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton