There are many ways to learn Rails and here are a few that seem to work from me:

1. del.icio.us – Subscribe to the Ruby on Rails tag. This feed constantly brings the latest and greatest from the Rails world into your RSS reader. While I read somewhere recently that you will never learn the language by just reading the code (which I agree with), it helps to see what is going on within the community.

2. Tutorials – I try to do a couple of tutorials a week. Often times a list of tutorials will come through my del.icio.us RSS feed and I try to do the tutorials listed. Mainly tutorials are useful if you are trying to do similar things within your app. Going through tutorials helps one understand how the source code works together, but must be applied right away to whatever you are doing. Otherwise it’s just like reading the code and not coding.

3. Books – There are a few great books out there, my favorite being the O’Reilly book, “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running.” Books are nice because they usually take you through the process of learning a whole application, versus just knowing a few snapshots of it.

That’s about it. How do you get your daily dose of Rails?

I have never tried to learn a programming language in the same fashion I am trying to learn Ruby on Rails. It takes a lot of dedication and persistance. At times I am finding it a bit discouraging, as there is a whole lot to learn. I have no basis for comparison, so when tutorials describe a similarity to another language, it brings me no extra help.

That being said, I am truly enjoying building stuff in Ruby on Rails. I picked up the O’Reilly book, “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running,” by the same guy who did the first few tutorials I followed, Curt Hibbs.
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For the last few years, the idea of learning programming has interested me. The first language I tried to pick up was PHP. I now have snippets of code here and there I can paste and reuse, but I don’t know the language. PHP has a lot of syntax, and trying to pick it up as a “side thing” just wasn’t working for me. Not to mention the level of discipline one has to have to learn a language.

Enter Ruby on Rails. About a month ago, I decided to digg into the language that is so hot right now. Why not? I’m a HUGE follower. Actually I saw Michael Buffington give a presentation at WebVisions 2006 here in Portland.

This will be the first of many posts describing my struggle to learn RoR.
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