What next? Write code every day!
Pick something and get started
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This is the most important thing: pick your next project — a tutorial, a class, or building your own app — and get started right away. Momentum is important.
Keep in touch
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Reach out to the people you connected with at your workshop. Coding with other people around is really motivating, plus you get to help each other solve trickier stuff.
More RailsBridge
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Come back to another workshop as a student, TA, or teacher. Teaching is a really great way to learn, too. (You'll be ready to TA sooner than you think, so don't be shy!)
Resources for you
Ruby Tutorials
- Our Ruby Programming for Beginners curriculum — includes project exercises
- Ruby Monk — Ruby lessons & tutorials.
- Sarah Allen's & Alex Chaffee's TestFirst.org — learn Ruby or JavaScript the test-driven way.
- Ruby Koans — a lovely interactive way to test what you know about Ruby so far.
- Learn Ruby the Hard Way — a Ruby port of Zed Shaw's introductory programming tutorial Learn Python the Hard Way.
- Code Like This (Ruby) – slides and videos teaching Ruby, linked to TestFirst Labs
Books
- Chris Pine's Learn to Program — explains Ruby from the very beginning; includes great challenges & exercises.
- Programming Ruby (a.k.a "The Pickaxe Book") — a comprehensive reference of the Ruby language. A good second or third book on Ruby.
- Eloquent Ruby — focuses on writing idiomatic Ruby rather than programming skills or concepts.
Reference and Documentation
- Ruby documentation — it's great to just read through the available methods for strings, arrays, hashes, and the enumerable mixin.
Object Oriented Programming
- Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (or POODR for short) is the book on object-oriented design by rockstar Sandi Metz.
Background
- What is Ruby on Rails? — in-depth primer introduces basic concepts and explains why Ruby on Rails is popular
Rails Tutorials
- Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial — an intermediate level tutorial that is highly recommended throughout the Rails community. Extremely well written, technically sound, comprehensive and up-to-date. Work up to being able to complete this tutorial at least once.
- Complete Rails app, sequenced code & free screen casts. Sequenced, structured with twitter oauth, haml and zurb foundation, designed to be more approachable to beginners by a previous-beginner.
- Learn Ruby on Rails, a book for beginners by Daniel Kehoe, free for RailsBridge participants.
- Our Ruby on Rails curriculum. If you've done it already, try recreating Suggestotron without using the scaffold command!
- Rails Tutorials — recommendations for a Rails tutorial to suit your skill level and learning style
References and Guides
- RailsGuides — well-written and organized guides to Rails
- RailsCasts — short, clear, and excellent screencasts by Ryan Bates
Other collections of resources:
- Our Ruby and Rails Resources Pinterest board — includes books, online tutorials, Meetup groups, and more
HTML & CSS
- Shay Howe's beginning & intermediate HTML & CSS tutorials
- The RailsBridge front end curriculum (best experienced at a workshop)
- Our front end resources Pinterest board
HTML
CSS
- Learn Layout
- Mozilla Developer Network's CSS tutorial
- Mozilla Developer Network's CSS Reference
- CSS-Tricks - when you Google something about CSS, there's a good chance you'll end up at this great site.
JavaScript & jQuery
- Max Ogden's JavaScript for Cats
- Codecademy — Javascript & JQuery tutorials
- Try jQuery by Code School
- Learning Advanced JavaScript by John Resig (who invented jQuery!)
Beyond HTML & CSS & JavaScript
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are understood by the browser, but they're not a joy to write in. So people have built pre-processors to take new, more pleasant-to-type languages and turn them into the thing the browser can understand (i.e., HTML, CSS, & JavaScript).
- Haml - an indentation-dependent markup language that gets processed into HTML
- Sass - CSS, but with nesting, variable, mixins, and happiness. Stands for "Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets".
- LESS - like Sass, but different.
- CoffeeScript – gets to the browser as JavaScript, but you get to type fewer characters!
Git
- Pro Git, by Scott Chacon is excellent
- git ready by Nick Quaranto, is a blog-ish tutorial with a lot of good ideas.
- Git Immersion is an in-depth tutorial for Git
- CodeSchool & GitHub paired up to make tryGit, a quick 15 minute intro to Git.
DevOps
- Ops School: open source training in ops
Computer Science
- Khan Academy Computer Science
- Project Euler, fun math + programming problems
Human parts of being a web developer
- Apprenticeship Patterns by David Hoover