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Answers to follow, but try to make sure that you're not being overzealous in your attempts to learn Ruby. Questions about general code methodology are good, but in order to really understand and apply them you'll have to have a pretty solid grasp on the basics.

Despite how it may seem, you might be making it harder on yourself by trying to "skip ahead" and start applying later concepts early on.

There's a reason the first program most people write doesn't involve creating a Person class that responds to greet_with_hello(world).

If you've simply finished the Rails tutorial and want some Ruby experience, I'd recommend giving The Well-Grounded Rubyist a try. Many people in your position have done very well by it, and it will teach you what you need to know as you need to know it.

But as for your actual questions.

>What is the best resource to learn general code methodology and syntax, language agnostic. I'm picking things up what I would consider to be pretty quickly, but I know being able to learn about general themes and syntax of coding would help immensely.

Syntax is inherently tied to the language you're using. While there are similarities between some languages, there's no general "Guide to Syntax" that you would need to worry about. Happily, many people find that syntax is the easiest thing to pick up while learning an additional language. The general concepts are what you learn the first time, and then you learn "How do you do loops in C++ again?"

So don't worry about syntax.

However, Ruby does have the Ruby Style Guide that will answer questions about how to make your code look. As you'll find is the case with many things in Ruby, the style guide is not written in stone. It's just a good idea, most of the time.

With that out of the way, we can move on to things that are not language specific. Well, sort of.

Data Structures, Algorithms, and Design Patterns are established ways of doing or handling certain tasks. In theory/abstract, these are language agnostic. In practice, application or use can vary between languages.

There are a handful of decent books that will instruct you on advanced data structures and algorithms. I would visit /r/learnprogramming and peruse their sidebar for recommendations. That being said, I have yet to find a book written with examples in Ruby though. If you're completely unfamiliar with other languages then you might want to find something that deals in some sort of pseudocode.

It might be difficult to translate the concepts that are presented in pseudocode (or whatever language the book chooses) into Ruby. Especially if you are not decently comfortable with solving problems in Ruby, and thinking about problems in Ruby.

However, there are some books out there on how to design things in Ruby. They happen to be really good books too. I've honestly lost count of how many times I've recommended them, let alone how many time I've seen them recommended.

Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby will essentially guide you through learning what should and should not go into an object, and when to make those decisions. It is an eminently readable book, and conveys the information in concise and graspable fashion.

But if you're not in a position where you're really comfortable with the idea of what Objects are, and how you create/use them in Ruby, this book might be best saved for after you get a handle on the basics of that stuff.

In fact, most people seem to get the most benefit out of this book after they should have already read (and heeded) it. Sort of a situation where the right way makes the most sense only after you've been doing it the wrong way.

Secondly, Design Patterns in Ruby will show you how several common ways of doing things are utilized in Ruby. Personally, I read POODR before Design Patterns in Ruby, but I'm not aware of any reason read them in any particular order.

I'll reiterate that both of these books have general design concepts inside of them, but that they are dyed-in-the-wool Ruby books. You will absolutely learn things that you can take elsewhere, but it won't come to you in a purely abstracted manner.

>Is there a list of all the predefined calls in Ruby that I can find somewhere. Occasionally I write to do something only to find out that I'm breaking down a process that is shortened already. I'm sure these are commonplace for people who have coding experience before starting Ruby, but that's not a luxury that I'm afforded.

Absolutely! It's at Ruby Docs.

Don't get yourself down on this one. In this very particular case you might be a little better off than someone that has a bunch of programming experience in other languages.

Why you ask?

Lots of people aren't necessarily expecting the ease in which you can cause things to happen in Ruby with just a few method calls. They are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more used to breaking things down into smaller problems as a matter of necessity than you are. So congrats! Fewer habits to break there!

You can actually just google "ruby docs class-name" for whatever class you're working with to see what methods are available to you out of the box and what those methods do.

As a recommendation, I'd get pretty familiar with the module Enumerable, and check out the Array class. You'll end up using those a lot.

Like a whole lot.

In case you're curious, the awesomeness found in Enumerable is usually where people with prior programming experience tend to make things harder on themselves, because they're use to things being harder on them. A one line split, sort, and join is just a thing of beauty.

>Lastly if there was anything that really helped you that I didn't mention I'm open to any suggestions really.

In all honesty, what really helped me the most in learning Ruby was getting really comfortable with the syntax, and then learning what to do after that.

RubyMonk is probably one of the best places I've used to get a guide through Ruby, even advanced topics.

CodeWars is a good way to give your mind a nice stretch and workout. You'll just solve little problems that force you to make sure you know how to use Ruby when you need it.

After you're comfortable with the language, start making some small projects.

Games are usually a good first start. They have clearly defined rules and orders of events, as well as lots of things that are easy to recognize as objects.

Black Jack, Tic-Tac-Toe, MasterMind, BattleShip, and Chess are all pretty good projects to work on, and maybe in that order too.

Somewhere around then end of Tic-Tac-Toe or MasterMind I'd probably crack open POODR and giving it a read through. The value of all the lessons might not make complete sense at first, but it's that way with everybody. Just trust the author and go along with it.

Lastly, and I can not stress this enough, learn how to write and use tests for your code.

I know. It seems like tests are a waste of time. You're writing them before you're even really writing the code. On top of that, you already know how you want to do the thing you want to do, and it'll work!

Trust me. If the thing you're making is at all complicated, write some tests.

If you're ever going to want to change anything about it, write tests for it.

It will save you an incredible amount of time when you start breaking things, and will also give you the confidence that things probably aren't broken after you've fixed them.

Also, feel free to ignore everything I said about not jumping too far ahead. People learn in different ways, and desire to learn in different ways. If you feel like learning more advanced concepts now is going to be way more interesting for you, then you should totally do so.

Just some food for thought. Disclaimer: I'm just an average joe, and not a marketing pro. When I think of your app, I think of it as a "family feud" style game where the point is to try to guess the most popular answer to each question. -- what does this have to do about judging others and being a safe place to do that? That would be a better description for tinder or some kind of "hot or not" app, but not for what you have created. In crafting your value prop, I'd recommend you turn to this book and follow some of their writing principles: http://www.amazon.com/This-book-teach-write-better/dp/0989895300/ . For example, if you follow their principle that "people don't care about you. they only care about themselves", you could rewrite something that may be more engaging to the average joe visiting your site. My thoughts are something like: "Do you know people as well as you think you do? Let's play." Where I wrote "people" in the previous sentence, you could replace that noun with "left handed people", "men", "women", or any noun if you want to target specific categories of interest. I hope this helps!

The Rails 4 Way is excellent. It really covers everything, filling in gaps that you may have in your knowledge.


I would suggest reading this once you have a bit of rails knowledge. I've read the book over twice, and it was responsible for a surge in my rails knowledge/abilities.


I would actually suggest you make sure your understanding of Ruby is absolutely solid before you read the Rails 4 Way. It's not necessary, but I think the best way to learn Rails is to first have a full understanding of Ruby. That way, you truly understand what's going on under the hood when you're learning about various Rails features.


For Ruby, I recommend The Well-Grounded Rubyist. This is a great book, and it doesn't require you to code along with it (thought it does allow you to if you want, and it comes with sample code you can download).

Rails developers don't really need IDEs, just a text editor like Atom or Sublime and the Terminal.

I recommend Daniel Kehoe's Learn Ruby on Rails. It provides more background and explanation than Michael Hartl's book. It's on Amazon but you can get it for free at learn-rails.com.

This book is a pretty good tutorial for learning the basics of how to use Rails.

My book Learn Ruby on Rails will be free on Amazon from Dec 21 to Dec 25.

Check out the five star reviews :-)

Practical Object-Oriented Design by Sandi Metz and Refactoring: Ruby Edition by Jay Fields, Shane Harvie, and Martin Fowler with Kent Beck were both invaluable for me. They’re more Ruby focused than Rails, but these will help with Rails and so much more.

I apply what I learned in these books in Python, PHP, Ruby, and any other object oriented language I happen to be using.

Eloquent ruby ( http://eloquentruby.com/) and Practical Object Oriented Design by Sandi Metz ( http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Object-Oriented-Design-Ruby-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321721330 ) are two solid books that I enjoyed a lot.

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