How long it took you to learn Ruby?

[wihee]

How long it took you to learn Ruby? I am interested in start learn it.
Can you recommend any book,tutorial or something for a newbie?

[Mittineague]

If by "learn" you mean "newbie level", not long at all. In fact, because I have experience with other languages, I practically knew it before knew it.
So really, for "Ruby" (not counting the Rails framework), I'd consider myself an intermediate. That is, I understand and can write plenty of code OK, but still have a bit to learn (especially OOP-wise).
Rails is a different story, I had a heck of a time installing it on my old OS, and although I can follow tutorials OK, I still only understand the "trees" not the "forest". That is, I can understand what others have done well enough, but don't know enough to do complex stuff on my own cold without giving it a lot of thought, and lots of trial and error.

Check out the "resources" sticky in this forum. I posted some Rails tutorial links in it here http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show...3&postcount=41

To do some pimping for SitePoint, let me recommend their book http://www.sitepoint.com/books/rails...deeeb4490dea32 It took me a few trys and a few days to get through it, but I like it OK. I learned quite a bit about Rails from it.

[Isabella_Smith]

Hi,

As "mentor" has replied you before, this is really good for you. Besides you can find some relevant here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...orials&spell=1

This may help you.

Nice Day!

[mikerouse]

I am a fellow newbie and have not got any previous experience of languages other than a splash of PHP and JavaScript.

I'm finding the Patrick Lenz book "Simply Rails" quite useful. There's a new version available on the Sitepoint website. Once I understood the basics from Lenz I also peeked at "Rails Cookbook" by Rob Orsini and published by O'Reilly. This was useful to see where I could take Rails and for snippets of goodies.

I'm finding this forum useful too. I am also finding Google useful.

[sherl0ck]

I am a fellow newbie and have not got any previous experience of languages other than a splash of PHP and JavaScript.

I'm finding the Patrick Lenz book "Simply Rails" quite useful. There's a new version available on the Sitepoint website. Once I understood the basics from Lenz I also peeked at "Rails Cookbook" by Rob Orsini and published by O'Reilly. This was useful to see where I could take Rails and for snippets of goodies.

I'm finding this forum useful too. I am also finding Google useful.

sorry dude,
but rails != ruby. rails is a subset of ruby.

[mikerouse]

D'oh... My bad

[Arlen]

Why (the lucky stiff)'s Poignant Guide is probably the least threatening place to learn ruby. It's actually a very simple language to learn, though it will take lots of practice to use it well.

How long will it take you? Probably no more than a few hours to write simple ruby code. Once you have the simple parts of it down, start working on advancing your knowledge through taking code samples apart (Rails is useful for this, though it means you have to learn a framework as well) to see what makes them work. If you're looking for Ruby books, try O-Reilly's "Learning Ruby" followed by "The Ruby Way" (by Hal Fulton, published by Addison-Wesley).

[Majglow]

4 years into ruby and I'm still learning.

[vgarcia]

4 years into ruby and I'm still learning.

Same here, started learning it in 2005 and I still learn new things with nearly every new project.

[Megapixelicious]

Ruby is easy because it is easy to read, it is hard because it is so flexible and powerful that you can get lost very easily. The hardest part for me was to understand the concept of yielding and see where I could use it in my functions.