Ruby on Rails Tutorials (version 2.0+ compatible)

April 8th, 2008 · No Comments

If you’re like me and just started learning Rails version 2 from version 1, you might have encountered a pre-December 2007, “Oh, I get it!” to a post-December 2007, “WHY IS IT SO HARD TO START A NEW APP?” (December is the time they released Ruby on Rails 2.0 by the way). I hear people now whispering, “This guy is an idiot, version 2.0 is easier if anything,” which on some counts is absolutely true but I’m in that minor population that picked up Rails right before the upgrade and while I learned via Rolling with Ruby on Rails (v1) and other famous tutorials, a lot of those are now in need of an upgrade to accommodate 2.0.

Every tutorial that invited you to insert the scaffolding language into your controller file and every tutorial that uses MySQL without mentioning that Sqlite as the new database default will irk you with a few minutes (or in my case way more) of frustration. If you were like me and saw the screencast of David HH’s pure, sexy Rails magic, you didn’t bother to look at the Rails 2.0 release notes or the many articles covering the differences, because you wanted to find a step-by-step tutorial that took you from Rails newb to Rails pro (in otherwords, instant gratification). Unfortunately it’s not that easy (although there are still some aspects of Rails that amaze me) and you can have a day when you get absolutely nothing done because you were just trying to figure out why something is the way it is. Ahh, the many joys of convention over configuration.

I’m not a Rails magician nor an expert so I am not offering technical advice or making a tutorial. But I will offer you a small, but hopefully growing, list of tutorials and solutions to help you get into and advance in Rails 2.0.