So the people at 37signals are working on a new development process for building HTML5 phone apps. Ryan said “It’s basically like rails but all build on a javascript”. They use CoffeeScript which is doing javascript but looks like ruby and for the templates they are using eco. Eco lets you embed CoffeeScript logic in your markup, eco looks like the rails erb files. So this ruby inspired way of making mobile phone apps looks like the rails development process 37signals is currently using. I’m looking forward to see it go open source.

Ryan Singer at Future of Web Apps, London 2010 from Ryan Singer on Vimeo.

1. Start learning Ruby with “Learn to Program” by Chris Pine

If you want to learn Rails first you need to know a bit about programming in general. Chris Pine learns you all the basic things about programming in the Ruby language. He explains things like Array’s, Strings, Hashes and if else statements are. I highly recommend to start with this ruby tutorial. This way you have a good basic set of skills to make you a good Rails programmer. You can buy his book  Learn to Program or you can do the tutorial on his website.

2. Rails for Zombies

Rails for Zombies is a pretty easy and good solution if you want to learn the basics of Ruby on Rails. You dont need to install anything on your computer just watch the video and do some exercises in the browser afterwards.

3. Railstutorial.org

The first two tips are about learning ruby and getting started with rails. Railstutorial.org explains the whole process of building an application in Rails. It starts with installing the right version of ruby and rails on your computer so you can get an app running locally. In the tutorial they are going to make a demo application that looks like twitter. While making the application they learn you how to programme in Ruby on Rails.

Railstutorial.org is the best way to learn Ruby on Rails. The website explains the whole process of building a website in rails. Step by step they explain the nature of a rails app, how to work with git, understanding Model View Controller and Test Driven Development. You can read the book online for free or buy the pdf for 39 Dollar.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

The system will walk you through each step of language-building. Each section of the book will introduce a new concept and then apply its principles to a language that we’ll build together. All technical chapters end with a Do It Yourself section that suggest some language-extending exercises. You’ll find solutions to those at the end of this book.

Our language will be dynamic and very similar to Ruby and Python. All of the code will be in Ruby, but I’ve put lots of attention to keep the code as simple as possible so that you can understand what’s happening even if you don’t know Ruby. The focus of this book is not on how to build a production-ready language. Instead, it should serve as an introduction in building your first toy language.

You can find a review over here.

Buy the book “Create your own programming language”here.