Over the past few weeks I have seen a steady increase in frequency of questions pertaining to this exact question. With the coming of Rails 2.0, there is no reason for someone new to RoR programming to start with a Rails 1.2 tutorial only to get told that is no longer the de facto method in Rails 2.0. So where should you start?

Well that is a very good question. In my opinion the best way to learn Rails 2.0 is to pickup a good Rails book which almost everyone recommends +Agile Web Development with Rails, version 2+, however nearly any book that has been recently published should have most the information you need. I suggest reading over the basics of the first few chapters until you feel bored to tears with their lame shopping cart example, or you feel adventurous and want to get your hands dirty. At this point I would read this tutorial which will help you get started on every programmers first real project, a blog!

Now to be honest, I do firmly believe that you learn nothing but a false sense of security from programming via tutorial and I am sure most would disagree. At the time when I started rails programming I followed tutorials like a fiend only to find that I started to rely on my copy/paste skills over my own understanding of rails programming. I finally broke the habit by using our good friend, Mr. +scaffold+. Now scaffold is a cheap way to get your controllers and views up and running, but you must force yourself to go back and look at the generated code *and understand it*! Things to focus your attention on during scaffold studying is the form generation, and also the routes.rb folder as these are the two seemly simple, yet at the same time overly confusing part of the rails framework.

As far as learning more after you understand the basic idea of scaffolding, models, and routes? Well first bookmark this site: Noobkit as I find it much friendlier than the regular rails documentation. Then just start adding on, changing, and updating the base code that scaffolding gives you. Lastly, one word of advise to those new to rails. “Rails does not have magic powers, its Ruby doing all the work”