“Learning Rails has been an awesome way to learn about programming; using the ‘Rails’ framework and opinions helped me to learn best practices and object oriented programming concepts.” How I did it: I bought Simply Rails 2 and coded the example digg like site, ‘shovel’. Then got very excited about rails and bought the Agile Web Development with Rails book; and built the example store application. Since I’m a huge fan of twitter I built my own short URL site for tracking clicks on the links I post all around the web - rant.cc . Starting to feel confident, I build out a new site in the agile style called prayerlife.net the concepts are similar twitter and 43things. This time I was working without a tutorial but referencing the Agile book and searching the web and google group Ruby on Rails: Talk for help along the way. I also tune in to podcasts: Railscast, Rubyology, and Learning Rails. In addition, I participate in a local usergroup, OCRuby.com, where I can ask questions and learn from others in realtime. At a meeting I learned from a presentation on using the console while demonstating ‘Active Record’; this helped me to catch the key concepts of data models. Lessons & tips: The best way to learn is to… just build it. Get in touch with others who are learning as well. Also, connect with those who have programming experience. The podcasts are are great way to get past concepts that seem difficult. Resources: Podcast: Railscast, Rubyology, and Learning Rails ### UPDATE: I shut down rant.cc and prayerlife.net projects and no longer own the domains.