Rails Tutorial
Michael Hartl
13 people recommended it in 3 threads, 2017–2023.
What people on Hacker News said
This book (although an older edition) is largely what got me into programming, and taught me so much about Rails.
I've known multiple people who were stuck in their attemp to learn to code before using railstutorial, I view it and the book "sql: visual quickstart guide" as two very well designed intros that manage to avoid having sections with random jumps in difficulty and terminology usage that can leave true beginners behind.
It'll run you through building a twitter clone and introduce you to git, heroku, a bit of CSS/HTML, and even goes into AJAX a bit. I can't recommend it enough to people looking to get into rails.
Not only that, but for me what was super helpful was the "this is how real developers would approach this" in terms of covering lots of workflow things, design patterns, Git, unit tests, setting up your dev environment, sprucing it up with some gems, etc. Can't recommend it enough.
Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial (https://www.railstutorial.org/) leads you through Ruby, Rails, Git, and deployment to Heroku through two very small projects and one related larger project that takes up the bulk of the book.
It's practical and concise and there's not a lot of unnecessary fluff.
I loved it so much that I bought the movies just to make sure he earned something from me for such an extraordinary piece of work.
Where it comes up
- Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project? 2017 · 8 recommendations
- Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects? 2020 · 4 recommendations
- Ask HN: Books that teach programming by building a series of small projects? 2023 · 1 recommendation