最近为了巩固提高自身水平，开始翻阅 rails 方面的书籍，发现的前言非常清晰的解释说明了身处任一阶段的读者应该如何学习提高自身水平。所有想在 rails 领域发展的同学都应该仔细看看。

最后一段解答了月经帖，rails 适合做企业级开发吗这个蛋疼的问题。

The Rails Tutorial contains integrated tutorials not only for Rails, but also for the underlying Ruby language, the RSpec testing framework, HTML, CSS, a small amount of JavaScript, and even a little SQL. This means that, no matter where you currently are in your knowledge of web development, by the time you finish this tutorial you will be ready for more advanced Rails resources, as well as for the more systematic treatments of the other subjects mentioned. It also means that there’s a lot of material to cover; if you don’t already have experience programming computers, you might find it overwhelming. The comments below contain some suggestions for approaching the Rails Tutorial depending on your background.

对于所有读者：One common question when learning Rails is whether to learn Ruby first. The answer depends on your personal learning style and how much programming experience you already have. If you prefer to learn everything systematically from the ground up, or if you have never programmed before, then learning Ruby first might work well for you, and there are several book recommendations in this section to get you started. On the other hand, many beginning Rails developers are excited about making web applications, and would rather not slog through a 500-page book on pure Ruby before ever writing a single web page. Moreover, the subset of Ruby needed by Rails developers is different from what you’ll find in a pure-Ruby introduction, whereas the Rails Tutorial focuses on just that subset. If your primary interest is making web applications, I recommend starting with the Rails Tutorial and then reading a book on pure Ruby next. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition, though: if you start reading the Rails Tutorial and feel your lack of Ruby knowledge holding you back, feel free to switch to a Ruby book and come back when you feel ready. You might also consider getting a taste of Ruby by following a short online tutorial, such as can be found at TryRuby.3

Another common question is whether to use tests from the start. As noted in the introduction, the Rails Tutorial uses test-driven development (also called test-first development), which in my view is the best way to develop Rails applications, but it does introduce a substantial amount of overhead and complexity. If you find yourself getting bogged down by the tests, I suggest either skipping them on a first reading or (even better) using them as a tool to verify your code’s correctness without worrying about how they work. This latter strategy involves creating the necessary test files (called specs) and filling them with the test code exactly as it appears in the book. You can then run the test suite (as described in Chapter 5) to watch it fail, then write the application code as described in the tutorial, and finally re-run the test suite to watch it pass.

零基础：The Rails Tutorial is not aimed principally at beginning programmers, and web applications, even relatively simple ones, are by their nature fairly complex.4 If you are completely new to web programming and find the Rails Tutorial too difficult, I suggest learning the basics of HTML and CSS and then giving the Rails Tutorial another go. (Unfortunately, I don’t have a personal recommendation here, but Head First HTML looks promising, and one reader recommends CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland.) You might also consider reading the first few chapters of Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper, which starts with sample applications much smaller than a full-blown web app. That said, a surprising number of beginners have used this tutorial to learn web development, so I suggest giving it a try, and I especially recommend the Rails Tutorial screencast series5 to give you an“over-the-shoulder”look at Rails software development.

有开发经验但是没有 WEB 领域开发经验：Your previous experience means you probably already understand ideas like classes, methods, data structures, etc., which is a big advantage. Be warned that if your background is in C/C++ or Java, you may find Ruby a bit of an odd duck, and it might take time to get used to it; just stick with it and eventually you’ll be fine. (Ruby even lets you put semicolons at the ends of lines if you miss them too much.) The Rails Tutorial covers all the web-specific ideas you’ll need, so don’t worry if you don’t currently know a PUT from a POST.

Experienced web developers new to Rails: You have a great head start, especially if you have used a dynamic language such as PHP or (even better) Python. The basics of what we cover will likely be familiar, but test-driven development may be new to you, as may be the structured REST style favored by Rails. Ruby has its own idiosyncrasies, so those will likely be new, too.

RUBY 程序员：The set of Ruby programmers who don’t know Rails is a small one nowadays, but if you are a member of this elite group you can fly through this book and then move on to The Rails 3 Way by Obie Fernandez.

RAILS 新手：You’ve perhaps read some other tutorials and made a few small Rails apps yourself. Based on reader feedback, I’m confident that you can still get a lot out of this book. Among other things, the techniques here may be more up-to-date than the ones you picked up when you originally learned Rails.

有经验的 RAILS 开发者：This book is unnecessary for you, but many experienced Rails developers have expressed surprise at how much they learned from this book, and you might enjoy seeing Rails from a different perspective.

After finishing the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, I recommend that experienced programmers read The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black, which is an excellent in-depth discussion of Ruby from the ground up, or The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton, which is also fairly advanced but takes a more topical approach. Then move on to The Rails 3 Way to deepen your Rails expertise.

At the end of this process, no matter where you started, you will be ready for the more intermediate-to-advanced Rails resources. Here are some I particularly recommend:

RailsCasts by Ryan Bates: Excellent (mostly) free Rails screencasts PeepCode: Excellent commercial screencasts Code School: Interactive programming courses Rails Guides: Good topical and up-to-date Rails references. RailsCasts by Ryan Bates: Did I mention RailsCasts? Seriously: RailsCasts.

Rails 能做企业级应用吗？ Before moving on with the rest of the introduction, I’d like to take a moment to address the one issue that dogged the Rails framework the most in its early days: the supposed inability of Rails to“scale”—i.e., to handle large amounts of traffic. Part of this issue relied on a misconception; you scale a site, not a framework, and Rails, as awesome as it is, is only a framework. So the real question should have been, “Can a site built with Rails scale?”In any case, the question has now been definitively answered in the affirmative: some of the most heavily trafficked sites in the world use Rails. Actually doing the scaling is beyond the scope of just Rails, but rest assured that if your application ever needs to handle the load of Hulu or the Yellow Pages, Rails won’t stop you from taking over the world.