Learn Ruby on Rails Online

This simple tutorial on the official Ruby website will help beginners set up Ruby and understand the basics of how it works, though it would probably be better to have some understanding of coding to better follow the guide.

Ruby Docs is intended to serve as a quick and convenient access to documentation to boost developer efficiency. Through this site, you can get all versions of Ruby and Rails documentation, combined or separate, which is pretty neat.

For documentations on open source libraries for Ruby, you can search RubyDoc.info, as it generates docs on the fly for Gems and popular Git repositories. This should come in handy when building Ruby on Rails applications!

For API documentations for Rails, APIdock is a great place to check out. Its site lets users contribute to the documentations in the form of writing notes to existing parts of documentation, or they can thank other users' notes to make them more visible to everyone else.

This is a hugely entertaining guide to Ruby, complete with cute illustrations and great humor that will bring a smile to your face. The author, Why the Lucky Stiff, wishes you will be so in awe of the poignant guide and you will shed tears by the code's sheer beauty as you feed your brain 'Vitamin R'.

If you don't want to spend so much time simply learning the Ruby language and want to get started on developing web applications with Ruby on Rails, this is the perfect book to start off from. The first chapter guides readers through how to setup Ruby, the second chapter teaches some basic workings of Rails applications, and the rest of the book consists of a tutorial to create a large sample Rails application, which will guide readers through and learn as they follow the exercises. You can purchase the ebook version as well, which will come with screencasts. Otherwise, the online version is free for all to read.

Despite the name, this tutorial actually assumes the reader has no prior programming experience. Using the same teaching style of "Learn Python the Hard Way" by Zed A. Shaw, which has taught hundreds of thousands of programming newbies on how to code Python, this easy-to-follow tutorial guides readers through a plethora of exercises to gain a better understanding of Ruby. You can read the free html online version or purchase the book, which will come with videos.

Ruby Monk provides free, interactive tutorials for beginners to Ruby, where users follow the example codes to learn about how things work in Ruby. If you put in the correct input, the Master will be proud of you. If you run the wrong input, you will get a scolding from the Master. All in all it's a pretty fun website!

As it is difficult to get the most out of Rails without learning how to program in Ruby, Ruby Essentials aims to be a free online resource that provides concise and easy-to-follow guides to learning the Ruby language through code examples that will "bridge the gap between theory and practice".

This online guide will "walk you along the path to enlightment in order to learn Ruby". The tutorial will focus on teaching users to better understand how Ruby through testing exercises and learn how to build Ruby apps through test-driven development (TDD).

Naturally, one cannot skip over the great interactive resource called Codecademy. With extremely easy to follow exercises, Codecademy guides users how to program Ruby step by step where you can simply try out the code through your own browser.

As the Brainchild of EnvyLabs, the team of Ruby experts behind the weekly Rails podcast Ruby5, Code School gained its popularity through its free, massively entertaining interactive tutorials, Try Ruby and Rails for Zombies, and the team has been educating the Rails community for a long time. Both are free starters to try out how the courses work for you, and many beginners have found the courses quite useful.

Tooting its ability to teach total beginners how to build their first web app within a month, this course is a series of videos and tutorials that will guide students through Rails while learning HTML, CSS, and Javascript along the way. One Month Rails has had students from Google, Y-Combinator, and Bloomberg.

You may have heard of Treehouse already, but it would be wrong not to include it in this list. With over 86,000 students, some from companies like Twitter and AirBnB, Treehouse must be doing something right. According to students, the way Treehouse contextualizes their material and all the quizzes, code challenges, and achievement incentives are a great help. The Pro subscription will

Formerly known as Peepcode，Pluralsight provides "hardcore training" for developers, so it will be best for those who already have some basic programming knowledge to use this site. The basic membership provides access to all their videos, while the plus membership allows access to exercise files, accessments, certificates, and offline viewing.

Tealeaf Academy aims to give Ruby developers confidence to find job placement, and its immersive course is self-pace friendly. People who are serious about becoming a Ruby Developer can consider taking this course, as they will be very difficult.

Created by the co-host of the Ruby Rogues podcast, RubyTapas is a great place to get high-quality and up-to-date Ruby on Rails tips and tricks that will bring intermediate Rails developers to the next level of their skills. New, easy to digest screencasts are released every week, and subscribing should be well-worth the money. You can check out the free screencasts to decide whether you like the teaching style/content.

Althoug the site has not been updated since June 6, 2013, it is still a great place to get tips and tricks on Ruby on Rails. The short screencasts focus on one technique so viewers can quickly move on to applying it to their own projects. There are also text versions (ASCIIcast) for most videos if you prefer text.

The author of this blog, Mike Gunderloy, is a full-time Rails developer and contributer who is also the author of Rails Rescue Handbook and Rails Freelancing Handbook. His blog mostly covers Ruby on Rails and whatever else he finds interesting in the universe of software, and should be a good place to get tips for Rails development.

Arkency is a company that specializes in developing Rails applications for social networks apps, Facebook apps, mobile backends, CMS, and other web applications. Their blog consists of several tips and tricks shared by their Ruby Developers, which should be quite helpful.

Planet Ruby on Rails is not exactly a blog in and of itself, but rather a collection of useful Rails blog feeds from a variety of sources such as Ruby5 and Rails and GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS. All in all, this is definitely a site worth checking out just to stay updated on Rails tips.

Highly recommended by many Rubyists, this slick and beautiful text editor is easy to use with its various functions such as autocompletion, "Goto" aything, split editing, multiple selections, and more. While the core is not open source, it nevertheless has a variety of plugins to use thanks to its Plugin API. In short, many Rubyists use Sublime Text to code, so it is definitely something to try out.

With the Vim Ruby Plugin, this highly customizable and powerful text editor is known for its efficiency when one does not intend to use their mouse. Although it has a rather high learning curve and takes more time to customize, Vim will offer much more to those who like configuring their own text editors to suit their own needs.

A great open source IDE for web development, Aptana comes highly recommended by many Ruby Developers in boosting their productivity. It comes with RadRails plugin and has an integrated debugger, git integration, a built-in terminal and other nifty functions. Aptana even provides coding assistance for Ruby, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to help you quickly access methods, elements, and more. Java and Android developers may find Aptana especially familiar as it is based on Eclipse.

RSpec is a testing tool for the Ruby Programming language were you run tests through your command line. It was designed to enhanced the experience of Test-Driven Development, so it has a flexible and customizable reporting, built-in mocking/stubbing framework, and more. For those who want to build great apps, testing is something you'll have to do, so check RSpec out and become a better Ruby Developer!

This IRB (Interactive Ruby) alternative is great for debugging Ruby applications, and it acts as a runtime developer console for Ruby. It features syntax highlighting, a flexible plugin architecture, runtime invocation and source and documentation browsing. Pry is quite flexible and has several useful extensions, thanks to its thriving ecosystem.

A command line tool that handle events on file system modifications, Guard is especially handy when used with other testing tools like RSpec, as it lets you know which files have been edited and lets you perform some actions at the same time. It has a huge ecosystem and is built into Ruby, so you can install this tool with a simple command line. Guard is a great tool for Test-Driven Development.

Another IDE Rubyists have found useful, RubyMine provides on-the-fly code analysis and integrated debuggers. According to users, RubyMine is great at version control, refactoring, and code navigation, and it also has an easy-to-use file restructuring. Most people will find the lightweight Sublime Text enough to satisfy their coding needs, but if you like full-blown IDEs and won't mind spending some money over it, you can try RubyMine out.

For all your other needs for Ruby plugins and tools, you can refer to The Ruby Toolbox for an extensive and categorized list of all the libraries available on GitHub.