20 Ruby on Rails Tutorials to Rule Them All

20 Ruby on Rails Tuts to Rule Them All

Jul 23rd, 2009 in Ruby by Glen Stansberry

Today, we'll review twenty incredible Ruby on Rails tutorials that every developer should consider reading. Whether you're a beginner who prefers video tutorials or an experienced dev, you'll find an applicable tutorial here!

PG

Author: Glen Stansberry

Glen Stansberry is a web developer and blogger. You can read more tips on web development at his blog Web Jackalope or follow him on Twitter.

1. Try Ruby!

If you're going to have to learn a brand new language, why not learn it interactively? The Try Ruby! hands on tutorial is a step-by-step guide that shows you the basics of the Ruby language in 15-minutes. While it's not strictly a Rails tutorial, it's best to know the basics of Ruby before you dive right into the Rails framework.

2. Getting Started with Rails

Ruby Tutorials

This is the definitive tutorial on Rails. Written by the Rails team themselves, the tutorial shows you how to make a simple blog application. Simple, well documented, and perfect for beginners.

3. Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X

If you're a Rails developer, a Mac is an excellent choice for development as Rails comes shipped with Leopard. In fact, installing Rails on a Mac is as simple as typing:

$ gem install rails

and you're ready to start building apps.

Apple has a lengthy document on the benefits of using a Mac for Rails development, as well as code examples and best use cases. The tutorial is a tad dated, but the guts of the article are timeless with respect to technologies and methods used.

4. UC Berkeley One-Day Rails Course

If you've got a whole day set aside to learn Rails, the One-Day Rails course from UC Berkeley is fantastic. The learning course is broken down into 7 one-hour installments, and gives you the basics of Rails.

5. Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Ruby Tutorials

Again, not a true Rails tutorial, Why's (Poigant) Guide to Ruby is a fantastic and, ahem... odd way to learn Ruby. In fact, the free guide is so bizarre that I found it more useful than other learning resources because of its wit.

I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so you can always have this book’s tender companionship.

Odd? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.

6. Dominating Authlogic

Authlogic is one of Rails most popular authentication systems. Yet because Authlogic is so robust, it can quickly become complex if you're trying to utilize all the features and add different authentication scenarios.

Railscasts has an excellent screencast on how to manage complex use cases of Authlogic. The screencast runs just over 14 minutes long.

7. Ruby on Rails on Oracle: A Simple Tutorial

Rails is an easy framework to work with, but like any technology it takes time to master.

Oracle has a hands-on tutorial on how to build a simple product catalog with Rails with an Oracle database.

8. Beta Invitations with Rails

Ruby Tutorials

If you're building a web application that you want to marinate in "beta" status for a while, then you'll probably want to construct some sort of beta invitation system. Railscasts has an excellent 22-minute tutorial on how to set up beta invitations. It's easier than you might think.

9. Migrations

For Rails newbies, migrations might be difficult to wrap your head around.

Migrations are a convenient way for you to alter your database in a structured and organized manner.

The Rails team has crated a nifty tutorial on everything migrations, like how to create migrations from within your application, and how to use them to their full potential.

10. Rails Routing

Routing is another key aspect of Rails, and the ThinkFresh blog has a thorough tutorial on everything you need to make routes work from within your application. A great starter guide for Rails beginners.

11. Sexy Forms in Rails

Ruby Tutorials

If you're not keen on making every single form by scratch, check out RubyPond's Sexy Forms in Rails. The tutorial shows how to build forms without having to fill in labels or worrying about formatting.

The tutorial eventually led to FormBuilder, a custom builder for creating accessible forms in Rails.

12. Developing iPhone Apps Using Ruby on Rails

Ruby Tutorials

Developing iPhone Apps Using Ruby on Rails is a three-part series by IBM. It covers things like setting up your development environment (the authors use Eclipse with the Aptana plugin), serving mobile content and how to detect iPhone browsers.

13. Monitoring Backgroundrb with God

God, (at least in Ruby terms), is a monitoring framework for Ruby applications. It monitors things like server processes and running tasks, to make sure that your application runs smoothly on your server.

Aside from server monitoring, you can use God to monitor other features of your Ruby apps as well. There's a pretty heady tutorial on how to monitor the Ruby job processing daemon BackgrounDRb. You can build upon this tutorial to keep tabs on other aspects of your application as well.

14. Rails Security

Ruby on Rails is vulnerable to the same security problems that all other web apps can potentially have. The Rails team has put together a long guide on nearly all aspects of Rails security. Learn about popular injection methods, Rails-specific problems and how to effectively handle sessions.

15. Make Your Own IM Bot In Rails

Ruby Tutorials

As the web becomes more connected and in real-time, more applications are starting to utilize IM functionality. Rubypond has a tutorial on how to make an IM bot using Ruby, and then how to interface the bot with Rails.

The tutorial is definitely for those with at least an intermediate understanding of Ruby and Rails.

16. Using Java Libraries in Rails Applications

NetBeans, the popular Java IDE, has a tutorial on how to use the Java API in Rails applications. This is an advanced tutorial, and only for those very familiar with both Java and Rails.

17. Building a Social Networking Site in Rails

As sites become more and more social, the demand for those social features in Rails applications will also go up. Here's a tutorial on how to build aspects of a social networking site using social networking plugins for Rails. You can pick and choose which features you'd like to add or leave in the tutorial.

18. How to Run a Stealth Rails Application

Aside from being a killer billing solution, Freshbooks is a Rails application that tries to seem like a PHP application. In fact, they say they can pull it off with a single line of code in the routes.rb file:

map.connect ':fake_filename.php', :controller => 'php', :action => 'dispatch'

Surprise!

19. Scaling Rails

Ruby Tutorials

With high-profile Rails sites like Twitter taking a toll on scalability last year, the public has consistently asked the question: Will Rails scale?

Scaling Rails is a video series on how to effectively scale your Rails app through 13 screencasts. You'll learn multiple types of caching and database optimization techniques, as well as how to optimize database structures.

20. Dropping and Sorting with Ajax and Scriptaculous

The name of this tutorial says it all. Learn how to write draggables and sortables with Rails and Ajax. The article has coding examples and can easily be followed by a Rails beginner.


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User Comments

( ADD YOURS )
  1. PG

    Mike July 23rd

    aye!

    ( Reply )
  2. PG

    Luis Craik July 23rd

    I’m the first one! :o Yeah! Great tut! I like it, keep it up Tutsplus! ;D

    ( Reply )
    1. PG

      James July 23rd

      Lol you’re second!

      ( Reply )
    2. PG

      Muhammad Adnan July 23rd

      LOL

      ( Reply )
    3. PG

      Connor Crosby July 23rd

      Nice one!

      ( Reply )
  3. PG

    Hasanga July 23rd

    ok! first!

    ( Reply )
    1. PG

      James July 23rd

      And you’re Third! :D

      ( Reply )
    2. PG

      Connor Crosby July 23rd

      Hahaha, worst than the 2nd guy who thought he was 1st, ur third!

      ( Reply )
      1. PG

        Hasanga July 25th

        When I add my comment there were no any comments :(

    3. PG

      Jamie December 24th

      Extra Lol!

      You guys are funny…

      ( Reply )
  4. This looks like something I can do over the weekend :D

    ( Reply )
  5. PG

    sven July 23rd

    looking good

    ( Reply )
  6. PG

    Alex Wind July 23rd

    Nice list, I’ve heard of most of them but I never Freshbooks runs on Rails lol

    ( Reply )
  7. PG

    Scott July 23rd

    Considering that the Freshbooks thing was posted on April 1, I think that was actually a coy rip on RoR. Seems like you got punked!

    ( Reply )
  8. PG

    Connor Crosby July 23rd

    Nice tutorial :-D

    ( Reply )
  9. PG

    Jermaine Hercules July 23rd

    I like the hands on tutorial

    ( Reply )
  10. PG

    cbmeeks July 23rd

    @mike
    1998 called and said they want their internet back. lol

    w00t!!

    Nice list, btw.

    ( Reply )
  11. PG

    curtismchale July 23rd

    Check out RailsBridge and Railstutor as well for a new set of sites coming up with Ruby on Rails teaching.

    ( Reply )
  12. PG

    CSS Ninjalito July 23rd

    I think #18 was a joke from another list.

    ( Reply )
  13. PG

    ragingfx July 23rd

    To rails or to django..
    Gonna try rails this day because of this useful post. thanks!

    ( Reply )
  14. PG

    Michael July 23rd

    Nice! I don’t know too much about Ruby on Rails, but have a good friend that does use it quite a bit. I guess this will help me get started. Thanks!

    ( Reply )
  15. PG

    Soner Gönül July 23rd

    Thanks!!

    twitter.com/sonergonul
    friendfeed.com/sonergonul

    ( Reply )
    1. PG

      DemoGeek July 24th

      Yeah!

      ( Reply )
  16. PG

    Sunir Shah July 23rd

    Can you guess which one of the list is an April Fool’s Joke! ;)

    ( Reply )
  17. PG

    Paul July 23rd

    Every time somebody believes in #18, God kills a kitten.

    ( Reply )
  18. PG

    Aayush July 23rd

    Nice list….I’m a PHP person, but i really wanna learn rails….this one’s gonna really help….

    ( Reply )
  19. PG

    Yorick Peterse July 23rd

    What I’m really wondering is why do you find so many tutorials for certain frameworks, such as jQuery, CodeIgniter, RoR, Django, etc while the “vanilla” language is much more important. I’d love to see an tutorial about vanilla Ruby since I’m quite interested in learning it :)

    ( Reply )
    1. PG

      Chris July 23rd

      I’d agree, except Ruby (to my understanding) within context of building web apps is always “on Rails”. Not like PHP where you can use it minus a framework.

      ( Reply )
    2. PG

      Dan Harper July 24th

      ^ As above, Ruby isn’t a general-purpose language, and not a web-specific one like PHP is.

      ( Reply )
  20. PG

    Michael Rice July 23rd

    I’ve always been telling myself that I’ll learn some RoR.

    I never get around to it. Either way, I’ll bookmark this!

    ( Reply )
  21. PG

    Shane July 23rd

    Ooh, ooh. Another tip: Google Search.

    ( Reply )
  22. PG

    Ian July 23rd

    I see some people commenting on how 18 is fake… but what exactly do they mean? Are they suggesting the files just show up with a .php extension? If so can’t you already do that with a .htaccess file…

    ( Reply )
    1. PG

      Sunir Shah July 24th

      April Fools! (check the post date)

      ( Reply )
      1. PG

        Ian July 24th

        Yes, I realize it was an april fools joke… I’m just saying if their joke was that you can make RoR apps look like they’re PHP then it’s really not that funny since you can do that with an .htaccess file.

  23. PG

    Harro July 24th

    I tried Ruby, but I keep running into things I dislike or find odd.. Django is the framework for me.

    ( Reply )
  24. PG

    keidi July 24th

    great tuts. Thank you.

    ( Reply )
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    DemoGeek July 24th

    I would have loved to see some of the deployment related tuts also mentioned. Disappointed to see there is nothing listed for deployment and that’s the dreaded part of Rails that kept me away from taking it seriously. Would certainly love to see a tut on how to have a Rails app version controlled and deployed to a web host.

    ( Reply )
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      wtp July 24th

      you’re right, I tried Ror a while ago, and deploying is a real nightmare!!
      and there are loads of beginner tuts, but when you get to an intermediate level, it becomes difficult to find good tuts. Also things go so fast that when a book comes out, it already outdated

      ( Reply )
  26. PG

    Ryan Donahue July 24th

    Excellent list! Can’t wait to check these out over the weekend. Any way we could get the same type of list for PHP at some point?

    ( Reply )
  27. PG

    Glenn Gillen July 24th

    Hey, thanks for the links to my rubypond site :)

    ( Reply )
  28. PG

    Cody July 24th

    Cool, thanks for the list. I’ve been meaning to try out some Ruby on Rails, just haven’t got into it yet. With this list, it will be easy to find somewhere to start.

    ( Reply )
  29. PG

    Chris Paraiso July 25th

    #19 is awesome. some of the videos are specific to rails some are more general all about scaling.

    ( Reply )
  30. PG

    Thaninrat July 25th

    I’m make sure. I’m read this. XD

    ( Reply )
  31. PG

    Code.My July 27th

    Great list of Rails Tuts, any recommend book that can SPEED UP learning phase? or skill?

    ( Reply )
  32. PG

    Aperta July 28th

    Rock!

    ( Reply )
  33. PG

    Joe October 11th

    Nice List!

    ( Reply )
  34. PG

    xain October 26th

    Thank you.
    BTW, I had collected a list of all books on rails, and I hope it is useful to anybody.

    ( Reply )
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