Learning Ruby: Day 2

Well, Hackety Hack was a good start for some basic Ruby understanding. But I found some other resources that have helped me out a lot as well in tackling Ruby and Ruby on Rails.


1. A free excerpt online on how to learn Ruby and Rails by Sitepoint. You can even download the entire book as a pdf!

2. Along the way, you have to install Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on your machine. I ran into some issues on mine when wanting to set a password for the root user in MySQL, but ol' Chris gave me a kind pointer to get the job done in OS X (just search for "root").

I got one of my biggest questions answered that confused me at the start:

Q: "Can you learn Rails without learning Ruby?"

A: Yes, but it's not recommended.
Rails is a framework for Ruby. So best I can understand at this point, not knowing Ruby while trying to learn Rails is like having a structure of a house that's been built for you without yet knowing how to use a hammer, nails, level, etc. (I could be wrong, but that's how it seems to me so far.)

I'm realizing lately that I've already wasted quite a bit of time in contributing to the wealth of knowledge available online - mainly due to laziness on my part - and for that, I apologize. I've gained so much from others out there willing to document their learnings and findings online, and I'd like to start giving back by documenting mine, just in case that one other person out there happens to run into the same frustrating things that I do.