Ruby roadmap.sh

https://roadmap.sh/ruby

Recommend books: Ruby and software design

• Books I've finished, or am in the middle of:
  • Rails Scales! by Cristian Planas. I've been learning quite a lot from this one. Fair warning: it's a bunch of highly-specific topics.
  • The Well-Grounded Rubyist, 3rd Edition by David A. Black. The first edition of this book taught me ruby. It goes surprisingly deep, teaching from first principles instead of aiming to get people productive ASAP.
  • Programming Ruby 3.3 by Noel Rappin. The Pickaxe isn't just for beginners!
• Books I've collected on the topic but haven't yet read include:
  • Rebuilding Rails by Noah Gibbs
  • The Rails 8 Way by Dohmen et al.
  • Rails Way: ActiveRecord Deep Dive by Aadland et al.
  • The Ruby Way, 3rd Edition by Hal Fulton
  • Metaprogramming Ruby 2 by Paolo Perrotta
  • The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz)
  • Polished Ruby Programming by Jeremy Evans
  • High Performance PostgreSQL with Rails by Andrew Atkinson
• Books I intend to read when they are published:
  • The second edition of Ruby Under a Microscope by Pat Shaughnessy
  • Building Progressive Web Apps with Rails by Dohmen et al.
  • The Well-Grounded Rubyist, 4th Edition by David A. Black
  • Programming Ruby 4 by Noel Rappin. Announced the day after I made this comment, so I added this line in an edit.
• Non-Rails books that are also relevant to mastering best practices and design principles:
  • The Practical Guide to Structured Systems Design, Second Edition by Meilir Page-Jones... maybe? This is notably not OOP and much of it is historical, but covers topics other books will expect you to know: modularity, coupling, cohesion, connascence, etc.
  • Object Design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. I have not been able to find a better coverage of OO fundamentals than this, even though it's been 20+ years.
  • Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns or Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck. They are nearly the same book. The former is Smalltalk (Ruby takes heavy influence from Smalltalk & Perl), the latter is Java (but written with a decade more experience).
  • Design Patterns by Gamma et al. Some of it is mostly irrelevant; blocks and Enumerable mean few Iterators, for example. Then again, maybe that is just another incarnation of Iterator. Some of it only seems irrelevant; Visitors seemed useless to me until I wanted to interact with some Prism-parsed ruby ASTs. Now they're invaluable.
  • Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler. Rails is a Ruby implementation of a selection of these patterns. Even ActiveRecord was named and documented in this book for the first time as... Active Record.
  • SQL Antipatterns, Volume 1 by Bill Karwin. This covers important relational design gotchas and best practices, such as how to (and not to) represent tree structures. This is highly relevant for designing ActiveRecord models.
• Other books I would guess you'll enjoy:
  • Understanding Computation: From Simple Machines to Impossible Programs by Tom Stuart
  • Code, Second Edition by Charles Petzold
  • Strangely enough, Concurrent Programming in Java, Second Edition by Doug Lea is still supposed to be one of the best introductions to concurrency basics in any language. I haven't read it, though.

More comprehensive list of Ruby/Rails books

Most Ruby jobs in Europe and the Americas, you'll want to learn not just Ruby, but also how to develop competently with Rails. Rails development is web development, so in addition to Ruby I'd recommend you also learn HTML, CSS, and a little bit of JavaScript. Rails development is also information systems development, so I'd recommend you learn modeling and a little bit of SQL. And finally, Ruby and Rails both heavily lean into Object-Oriented Programming, so I'd recommend you learn Object-Oriented Analysis, Object-Oriented Design, Object-Oriented Programming, Refactoring, and Automated Tests.

Do you know what a class is? Do you know the difference between an Array and a Hash? If not, start with Learn to Program, Third Edition by Chris Pine. While you work through that, get your foundation in the web with Learning Web Design, Sixth Edition by Jennifer Robbins. You'll finish Pine before you finish Robbins, so start Programming Ruby 3.3 by Noel Rappin et al. while you finish Robbins. When you do, start reading SQL Queries for Mere Mortals, 4th Edition by John Viescas as you finish Rappin. (You'll notice I'm having you learn more than one skill at a time. This is by design, and is scientifically proven to be useful.) Take a breather your first Kent Beck masterpieces: Implementation Patterns (or maybe its doppelgänger, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns) followed by Tidy First?. Then wrap it up with Developer Testing by Alexander Tarlinder followed by Test-Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck.

When you arrive at this point, you'll have a really good foundation in programming (Ruby, Object-Oriented Programming), data modeling (SQL, relational database design), and web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). With those foundation skills in your noggin, it's time to assimilate them: a one-two(-three) punch of Agile Web Development with Rails 8 by Sam Ruby, followed by Active Rails by Kieran Andrews et al., followed by the Rails Guides ePub by the Rails community. I'm suggesting three beginner resources because it's a really wide framework, and multiple introductions are usually helpful. They each also teach in very different ways. Now go make stuff! But don't stop learning.

That's enough to get a few portfolio pieces (including automated tests) under your belt while you start looking for a junior developer job or an apprenticeship. Don't let your skills plateau here, though. You've just started, and a job in this industry means a lifetime of learning. Start learning Object-Oriented Analysis & Design by reading Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML by Meilir Page-Jones -- yes, it's old; no, that's not a problem. Follow it up with Smalltalk, Objects, and Design by Chamond Liu, then Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 2nd Edition by Martin Fowler. After that, read the couldn't-disagree-more-with-each-other Object Thinking by David West and Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications, 3rd Edition by Grady Booch et al.. Think critically about the differences in their approach, and pick a side.

While you're working through that OO track, get more breadth in web technology. Read JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 7th Edition by David Flanagan, HTTP: The Definitive Guide by David Gourley et al., and then HTTP/2 In Action by Barry Pollard.

Once you've done both of those, swing back around to some advanced Ruby on Rails material. Read The Rails 8 Way by Obie Fernandez et al., then Modern Front-End Development for Rails, Second Edition by Noel Rappin. If you find yourself working for a company that would benefit from having a native iPhone/Android app, read Hotwire Native for Rails Developers by Joe Masilotti. If you find yourself working for a company with a lot of traffic & users, read Rails Scales! by Cristian Planas. If you find yourself working for a big company with a lot of enterprise data to model and a lot of programmers, read Component-Based Rails Applications by Stephan Hagemann.

With this much experience under your belt, it's time to swing back around and start learning some architecture. Read Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma et al. concurrently with Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen. Then read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler, then Domain-Driven Design Distilled by Vaughn Vernon immediately followed by Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans. Wrap it up with Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design by Robert C. Uncle Bob Martin.

Treat the official Ruby Docs like a book

If you're looking for free (and you're not new to programming), don't discount the official documentation!

1. README
2. What's Ruby
3. Ruby in Twenty Minutes, Pt. 1
4. Ruby in Twenty Minutes, Pt. 2
5. Ruby in Twenty Minutes, Pt. 3
6. Ruby in Twenty Minutes, Pt. 4
7. Keywords
8. Code Layout
9. Literals
10. Assignment
11. Control Expressions
12. Pattern matching
13. Methods
14. Calling Methods
15. Modules and Classes
16. Exception Handling
17. Precedence
18. Refinements
19. Miscellaneous Syntax
20. Comments
21. Operators
22. Implicit Conversions
23. Ruby Standard Library
24. From there, just start exploring the Pages, Classes, and Modules!
    • Pages to read: Pre-Defined Global Variables, Ruby Command-Line Options, OptionParser Tutorial, Ruby Security
    • Classes to read: Object, Numeric, String, Symbol, Data, Struct, Array, Set, Hash, IO, Proc, Regexp
    • More classes to read: Exception, ERB, Pathname, File, Dir, Tempfile, Date, Time, DateTime, Net::HTTP
    • Modules to read: Enumerable, Comparable, Open3, Singleton, URI, YAML, JSON, FileUtils, OpenURI
    • Cool pages: Ruby Box, Encodings, Format Specifications, Packed Data
    • Cool classes: Delegator, Enumerator, BasicObject, Class, NilClass, TrueClass, FalseClass, Method, TCPServer, TCPSocket, UDPSocket, UNIXServer, UNIXSocket,
    • Cool modules: Digest, SecureRandom, OpenSSL, Bundler, Prism, ObjectSpace, English, Shellwords, Marshal
    • Concurrency stuff: Ractor (page), Ractor (class), Fiber (page), Fiber (class), Thread, Thread::Queue, Thread::SizedQueue, Thread::Mutex, Thread::ConditionVariable, Contributor's Concurrency Guide

Plus, the following are free online:

• Programming Ruby, 1st Edition (The PickAxe) (book)
• Ruby Essentials (book)
• Ruby Programming (book)
• Learn Ruby with the EdgeCase Ruby Koans (exercises)
• Ruby on Exercism (exercises)
• Ruby on The Odin Project (online course)

Sources: index, books 1, book 2, official docs