The focus throughout the Ruby on Rails Tutorial is on general skills that are useful no matter which specific technology you end up using. Once you understand how web apps work, learning another framework can be done with much less effort. That being said, the framework of choice in this tutorial—namely, Ruby on Rails—continues to be an outstanding choice for learning web development.
There are no formal prerequisites for this book, which contains integrated tutorials for the Ruby programming language, test-driven development (TDD), the Unix command line, version control with Git, HTML, a fair amount of CSS >, some JavaScript, and even a little SQL. That’s a lot of material to absorb, though, and if you’re new to software development I recommend starting with the tutorials at Learn Enough, especially Learn Enough Command Line to Be Dangerous and Learn Enough Ruby to Be Dangerous. On the other hand, a surprising number of complete beginners have gotten through this tutorial, so don’t let me stop you if you’re excited to build web apps.
The principal teaching method of this tutorial is building real working software through a series of example applications of increasing sophistication, starting with a minimal hello app, a slightly more capable toy app, and a real sample app. As implied by their generic names, these applications focus on general principles, which are applicable to practically any kind of web application. In particular, the full sample application includes all the major features needed by professional-grade web apps, including user signup, login, and account management. The final version of the sample app, developed in Chapter 14, also bears more than a passing resemblance to Twitter—a website that, coincidentally, was also originally written in Rails.
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The English version of Ruby on Rails Tutorial book is available for purchase at Learn Enough as an ebook in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats. The companion screencast series includes 14 individual lessons, one for each chapter of the book.