My Learning "Stack"
When learning to code I’ve used a number of resources, some of them in form of mentoring, but vast majority of my time will have been used working by myself. To facilitate that I’ve used a number of online resources, some of them basic, some fundamental and all of them useful at different stages of your coding experience (Some in perpetuity).
I’ve listed them here in a somewhat chronological order I’ve used them in and included book and watching recommendations if you have some interest about orbiting subjects as time goes on.
Good resource I’ve used when initially picking up SQL. Provides good basic understanding of SQL powered database queries.
Extremely basic Ruby exercises to show off how easy it is to just pick it up and run with it.
Gamified community driven courses for many languages, teaches working with TDD (but not test writing itself). It’s structure has been a driving force in how easy and fun it has been to “mess around with Ruby” and really go from dipping my feet to diving headfirst into the world of code.
Subscription based courses based on spaced repetition models. Excellent courses for Modern Javascript and SQL that I can recommend from my own experience; Have had the remainder of courses and screencasts available through www.destroyallsoftware.com. Overall the only paid subscription service I’ve used and well worth it’s price.
Regular expression helper for ruby. A must have unless you just happen to be a regular expression demigod.
Ruby documentation - your best friend as a Rubyist. I’m fairly certain I’ve asked google “Array/Hash methods Ruby” enough times to have justified moving the relevant documentation page to either my desktop wallpaper or chrome home page itself. The habit to re-google dies hard though.
https://guides.rubyonrails.org/
Basic guide to working with Ruby on Rails, My main gripe with it was that it’s relatively hard to follow as a newcomer but starts coming in more handy as time follows. Definitely a valuable resource to keep saved.
Rails documentation. Does what it says on the tin.
Tutorial that I’ve never finished personally but that has consistently been mentioned as one of the less painful ways to get into Rails. It has a good number of free chapters available so you can do a taste test before committing to the full 8 course meal.
https://www.betterspecs.org/
Set of two links for working with rspec . Highly recommend using them in unison to help with RSPEC especially coming in from Minitest (should you follow my path of mainly using Exercism to learn ruby and defaulting to minitest in personal projects)
https://stackoverflow.com/ (duh)
Feels kind of silly to put it in as it’s such a “fundamental” feature of life for anyone that codes but considering someone might be coming in absolutely green it needs to be included
Interesting presentations/videos/links:
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries - Free talk about boundaries in programming
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvWpdrfoEv0 - CGP Grey how machines really learn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY - The only unbreakable law - Molly Rocket
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mZBa3sqTrI - Dylan Beattie - Plain Text, Really?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avJHaC3C2U&t=610s&ab_channel=NDCConferences - The Art of Code - Dylan Beattie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY&ab_channel=Computerphile - Problem with time and timezones - Tom Scott
https://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2007/2/23/method-visibility-in-ruby - Method visibility in Ruby by Jamis Buck
https://cssgridgarden.com - An awesome resource for learning about grids in CSS.
https://codepip.com/games/flexbox-froggy/ - An excellent gamified experience for learning html/css flexboxes.
Special mentions go to the Fireship YouTube channel, providing easily digestible bits of knowledge that help guide later decisions
https://www.youtube.com/c/Fireship/videos
Book recommendations:
- Practical Object-Oriented Design, An Agile Primer Using Ruby (POODR) by Sandi Metz
- Eloquent Ruby (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) by Russ Olsen
