Rails Community Growing in Madison

Posted on March 2011 by in Rails

Hey Madi­son… Here’s an inter­est­ing trend you’ll want to fol­low closely– the rails com­mu­nity in your town is alive and growing.

I just attended the Mad-Railers meetup last night at Murfie’s head­quar­ters down­town. The event was well-attended — at least 25 peo­ple across all lev­els of abil­ity. What I found most exi­ct­ing was the num­ber of expe­ri­enced rail­ers there to help out. 

My biggest take­away was get­ting a chance to talk with a few of the expe­ri­enced rail­ers about what they do for free­lanc­ing and projects they are work­ing on.

And their day jobs. Turns out Getty has a shop in Madi­son. I was totally obliv­i­ous, but not any more. And they are pro­gram­ming in Ruby!

I wanted to get this out there– a list of resources for new folks like myself to boot­strap the Ruby / Rails learn­ing. Now I share with you…

Ruby

- Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/
 - A very weird, but also very good, free online intro­duc­tion to ruby.

- Ruby Koans: http://rubykoans.com/
 - Learn ruby in small chunks while TDDing

- Pro­gram­ming Ruby 1.9: http://amzn.com/1934356085
 - The newest ver­sion of the first suc­cess­ful Eng­lish book on Ruby

- The Well-Grounded Ruby­ist: http://amzn.com/1933988657
 - A high rated ruby book good for begin­ners or inter­me­di­ate rubyists

- Ruby 1.9 Peep­Code: http://peepcode.com/products/ruby19-i
 - screen­cast intro to ruby 1.9

- Ruby Inside: http://www.rubyinside.com/
 - a pop­u­lar ruby and rails blog.

Rails

- The Rails 3 Way: http://amzn.com/0321601661
 - A very com­pre­hen­sive Rails 3 book

- http://railsapi.com/
 - easy to search API docs for rails

- Meet Rails 3: http://peepcode.com/products/meet-rails-3-i
 - screen­cast cov­er­ing Rails 3

- Railscasts: http://railscasts.com/
 - free screen­casts cov­er­ing Rails and rails plugins

- Rail­stips: http://railstips.org/
 - blog cov­er­ing rails and related topics

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