Question

I’ve read several other questions about material in order to learn RoR. But my question is can I start learning RoR without Ruby?

It’s clear that the other way around is better, but I would rather try this way if it makes sense (somehow). Or learn both in parallel…

Answer 1

Well, given that Ruby on Rails is just Ruby written in a particular fashion (read: framework) yes you will need to learn Ruby.

You will need to learn these things about Ruby (amongst other things):

• Everything Is An Object. Everything. Yes, even 2 and "foo"
• Class Inheritance and What It Does(tm)
• How to tell the difference between class and instance methods
• Modules and how to use them correctly (class_eval Is Your Friend)
• People write gems. Use them. Re-inventing the wheel is fine and dandy for learning but re-inventing it because you think your method is better is not.

And these things about Rails:

• Do not fight conventions.
• Do not fight conventions.
• Model code goes in the model.
• Controller code goes in the controller.
• View code goes in the view.
• Helper code goes in the helper.
• Ask yourself “Does Rails have a helper for it?”. If the answer is “No” ask somebody else. The answer is likely to be “Yes”.

And these things in general about learning:

• Google it.
• Google it again.
• If the answer you seek is not within Googling distance, formulate it in a way that is kind to those who may know the answer (such as you’ve done with this question!)
• Appeal to people’s greater motives. How can helping you, help them?
• Try not to be too much of a help vampire.
• If asking in an IRC channel, use a pastebin service such as http://pastebin.com, http://pastie.org or http://gist.github.com
• Second rule about asking in IRC: Don’t ask “any ideas?” after your question. Your question should already ask this by itself.

And finally: Love what you do.