Max Kiesler - Designer
Learning Ruby: A Guide to Online Tutorials, Examples and Downloads
SubscribeMonday, March 20, 2006
When I started learning Ruby on Rails a little over a year ago someone in the Ruby community told me there were currently on 164 developers in the United States. Over the course of the last year that number has grown exponentially. As with many next generation technologies the challenge is how to learn it. Often times the only resources for learning are workshops, seminars, books or online tutorials and examples.
This article will present the best Ruby tutorials, examples and downloads I've found over the course of the last year. I've spent numerous hours searching google, del.icio.us, digg etc.. looking for usable and relevant examples. This list only exists, because of the time and energy of the developers spent providing this information to all of us for free. If you find these tutorials and examples helpful please drop by the developers site's and let them know how much you appreciate their great work.
If you know of other Ruby tutorials, examples or downloads please submit a comment or email me. Thanks!
Downloads
Rails Blog AppsAjax Hierarchical Category and Calendar browser
For a Typo blog
Typo
Ruby on Rails blog software. (Related post: Ruby on Rails Blog Software)
Rails Wiki Apps
Hieraki
Open source, wiki-like system.
Instant Rails
Drop it in your directory - and you're done
Instiki
A wiki clone which is very easy to use.
Tutorials
Ruby Activity IndicatorsProgress Bars with GD2 and Ruby
I went milling about for source for progress bars that would be suitably embedded within a Ruby on Rails application I'm working on and came up with nada.
Ruby Calendar
CalendarGrid
Ruby based calendar
Ruby Chat
AJAX powered chat in 3 hours on Ruby on Rails
A simple Web based chat built with Ruby on Rails. It seems to work okay, but I've only tested on FireFox and Safari. On IE it's bound to look totally out of wack as I'm not sure it supports position: fixed, which I used for the IRC-esque layout.
Ruby Image Manipulation
rmagick
Thumbnailer method for a Rails 'Photo' controller
Ruby Learning and Basics
Try Ruby
An interactive ruby tutorial where you can learn some basics right in your browser,
Tutorial in Ruby on Rails
As a newbie, getting started with Rails was tricky without some help from the IRC folks. If you get stuck, that's a good place for help, as the author hangs out in there pretty regularly. That said, some sample code is worth its weight in gold, so here's how I got a basic Rails application running.
Learning Ruby
A very good article on the basics of ruby.
Introduction to Ruby
For Perl programmers
Introduction to Ruby
For Mac OS X
Ruby Live Grid
AJAX Live Data Grid Example
Historically, data sub-forms are not something that have been presented well on the web. Pop-up windows and browser page refreshing are a significant regression from the interfaces which have been provided by client/server desktop applications for over a decade. Luckily, with the advent of Rails and its partials rendering, we are in a position to do something about this usability shortfall.
Ruby Login
LoginGenerator
Login & Authentication Generator
Ruby Text Editors
Integrate FCKEditor with your Ruby on Rails application
FCKEditor is an open source Javascript application for embedding a rich text box into an HTML form. I will show you have to integrate this application with your Ruby on Rails application.
Integrating a Rich-text Widget with Struts
The problem was straightforward, all I needed was a rich-text editor that would allow me to create XHTML that I could then send back to the client. I already had a textarea, and I just wanted a rich-text replacement. I thought this was going to be simple, but the problem cost me hours. In this entry, I show the process I used to identify a suitable AJAX/Javascript library, read on...
Ruby Shopping Cart
Open Source Ruby On Rails Shopping Cart | Sublog
The first and only Ruby
Ruby Helpers
Ruby Calendar HelpersCalendarHelper
Select dates from a calendar popup or in-page
DynamicCalendarHelper
Renders a basic calendar in HTML. Highly configurable and allows for databinding as well as formatting
Ruby Drag and Drop
HowToUseDragAndDropSorting
How to use drag and drop Sorting in Ruby on Rails
Ruby File Uploader
TinyFile
For the longest time I just wanted a quick, ready-to-go example of how to do some basic file uploads in a real rails app. Welcome to TinyFile.
Ruby Live Trees Helpers
LiveTree
DHTML tree widget that can load data asynchronously as-needed
Ruby Pagination Helpers
PaginationHelper
Paginate large tables
Ruby Sorting Helpers
SortHelper
Click column headings to sort tables (uses Ruby to handle sorting)
SortHelper2
Another take on sort via clickable headers (uses SQL to handle sorting)
Sort Helper the third
Sort database result sets with clickable column headers (also uses SQL to handle sorting)
Movtable
A port to rails of Movtable, full featured sort table, filterable, with context menus.
JavascriptSortableTables
Not a Ruby helper as such, but it doesnt require Ajax, Ruby or SQL to work - it's all in client side Javascript
Comments on this post
Rob Sanheim on 03/20 at 08:59 AM
I’m confused - why do you have things like activity indicator and the ruby calendar underneath “tutorials” ?
Also, it would be very helpful to note what tutorials can actually be used with 1.0+ of Rails w/o tweaking things.
Chad Crowell on 03/20 at 10:13 AM
I’ve also found Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby to be an *interesting* read, and worth a look (I know you listed Online resources, and this is more of a free book).
michael on 03/20 at 12:23 PM
Thanks Max. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.
Chuck Cheeze on 03/24 at 01:11 PM
Nice list. Great resources.
Jonathan Holst on 03/26 at 02:01 PM
Chad, The (poignant) guide is excellent 
Sibs on 04/19 at 11:48 AM
Thanks Max for all of your awesome work. I first found your Ajax resource collection on Digg and now I found this. Thanks you are awesome and very helpful!
Massimiliano on 05/22 at 04:12 AM
Nice list! I use it in future!
Harry Maugans on 05/28 at 08:10 PM
Great resource! Bookmarked.
Tesh on 06/10 at 05:50 PM
Great resource in one place, Thanks. I’ve bookmarked it.
John Hamman on 07/17 at 09:59 AM
Self plug, but I am launching a Ruby on Rails resource directory at rails411.com
vikash kumar on 07/25 at 09:27 AM
You are god,for ruby community specially for me.your work are amazing.
andy on 08/22 at 07:22 AM
Ruby on Rails is amazing. Max, tnx u for great list.
Regnad on 09/08 at 02:54 PM
I’d like to see some examples oof sorting floating point numbers. Example
["112.66", “130.5”, “162.0”, “27.54”, “33.64”, “40.6”, “43.0”, “66.0”, “78.2”, “82.0"]
Satish Talim on 09/26 at 02:32 AM
I have a small “Learning Ruby” study notes on the web. I made these notes while I started learning Ruby myself.
Flower Delivery UK on 10/03 at 10:15 AM
This is a lot of information I need. Thanks a lot. You seem to be an encyclopedia.
Regnad on 10/10 at 11:41 AM
Max, I forgot to say before this article was very helpful! I’d also like to know if anyone knows of a good message board where I can ask Ruby Newby questions.
Satish Talim on 10/10 at 06:23 PM
You can try this forum -
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=227
Gry on 11/16 at 09:30 AM
Thank you for this info. BTW: great blog, this is third article i read on your blog today
eMule on 12/10 at 05:11 PM
A very good article on the basics of ruby.
Regnad on 12/13 at 12:10 AM
By the way, I just wanted to point out a mistake that I made earlier with the example of how to sort values. Once I realized the error, sorting has been easy since. The problem with numerically sorting: ["112.66", “130.5”, “162.0”, “27.54”, “33.64”, “40.6”, “43.0”, “66.0”, “78.2”, “82.0"] is that the values listed in this array are “String” types, and they will try to sort in ASCII not Numeric!
array=[1.5, 10.5, 20.6, 123.4].sort_by {|a,b| a <=> b}
will work fine.
Pozycjonowanie on 12/21 at 04:18 PM
Nice list. Great resources Keep up the good work. Greetings from Poland
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Max Kiesler is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder
and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco
focused on next generation websites. About Max...
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