Question

I have 4+ years of exp in using PHP ! (Zend, CI, CakePHP)

but I am looking up RoR will it be difficult to adopt to RoR or

is it somewhat similar to PHP ?

Answer 1

To be frank, I’m not really answering whether rails is more difficult than PHP or not. But all I tried to do here is to gather the things that might help someone to get started with ROR. I love ROR and will really want to help someone who want to get started with it.

Ruby

A pure object oriented language. Everything you do here(calling function, assigning variable etc.) you are actually calling a function of a object. So need to grab that feeling first.

Rails

A pure MVC framework. As you have worked in Cake, you might find the activerecord part familiar. Working on Codeigniter will help you to understand the MVC layers.

However, to get started I would suggest the following steps:

1. Glimpse on Ruby

• Get a very brief concept of ruby. Here is a link with the basic concepts.
• Try to get the concept of Hash, Array, Symbol, Number.
• Learn about the ruby distribution. Like in ruby distributions, plugins are called as gem. Even the rails that you are going to learn comes as a gem in ruby 🙂

2. Starting with Rails

• You need to learn the terminologies of rails. Here is a link and another comprehensive one.
• In my opinion, the easiest way to get started is by creating a scaffold => running the rails built in server => see how it is working. To get started rubyOnRails guide is awesome.
• Once you will successfully run your scaffolded application, you are just ready to run on the track of Rails 🙂
• Following two links are your best friends in the journey with ROR.
  • http://apidock.com/rails
  • http://guides.rubyonrails.org

The discussion and suggestion is not something to be finished very soon. So just get started and share all your questions, even silliest, in this place. Remember your rails friends always. Of course Stack Overflow is always beside you but in that case it would be better to come up with specific questions.