I have fun blog posts about Ruby on Rails, a book about them and many other recommendations. Here’s a lot of my favourite material on that subject.
Rails Basics and Rails Internals:
- Understanding the Structure of Rails - an introductory post about how Rails is structured - the large gems that make up Rails
- Where Do I Put My Code in Rails? (updated) - my opinions about where to put various kinds of code in the Rails directory structure
- I spoke in 2013 at Golden Gate Ruby Conference about The Littlest ORM - basically the ORM chapter of Rebuilding Rails, turned into its own short talk
- What is Rack? - understand the basics of what Rack actually is
- No More Requires - how Rails skips requires in most cases, and how you can do the same thing via const_missing
- Digging Into the Rails Source - where to start
- Rack and Session Store - a quick intro/answer to “how does Rack/Rails store session data?”
- Understanding HashWithIndifferentAccess and the Rails Params Hash
- How Does Rack Parse Query Params?
- Use Rails Until it Hurts - But Not for APIs - a bit about when to use Rails, how to use Rails, and when not to
- Why Rails and Not Sinatra or Node.js? - an older post about Rails’ continued advantages… Most of which are still true
- Rack Authentication Middleware - how to use the simple built-in Rack authentication middleware
Larger Projects to Learn Rails:
- A workshop I gave at Southeast Ruby 2019 - similar to, but quite different from, Rebuilding Rails; build a stripped-down minimal MVC framework as fast as possible, roughly
- My book Rebuilding Rails is about how to understand Ruby on Rails deeply by building your own Ruby web framework, from blank directories, structured like Rails.