There are multiple ways to build web applications in 2021, more will probably spring in 2022. All have their pros and cons.

I will try to convince you - the reader - why I think you should choose Ruby on Rails by explaining what Ruby is and what is Ruby on Rails and then giving you some ideas about projects that you can build while learning to deepen your understanding.

I feel that we can do more as a Ruby community to help people experiement and embrace Ruby. There are a lot of resources available to learn Ruby, but I believe there are not enough up-to-date resources helping to transition to Ruby.

I don’t plan to create a new resource to teach Ruby itself or Rails, but more of a quide of existing resources available around.

Here are the reasons why I think Ruby on Rails is a good choice in 2022:

  1. It has a mature/battle-tested eco-system of plugins (they are called “gems”). You can find gems for authentication, for testing, for integration with a wide range of third parties (from AWS to Mailchimp, Twillio …)
  2. The Majority of IDEs are offering good support for developing in Ruby (RubyMine, Sublime Text, VIM, Visual Studio Code and many more). If you are searching for a good auto-completion I recommend TabNine, it has a great support for Ruby on Rails.
  3. Ruby is a language that is evolving, sometimes at the forefront of programming language innovation, sometimes borrowing great concepts from other languages, and oriented toward developer happiness.
  4. The community is welcoming, has great conversations, helpful responses, encouraging contribution, caring about new people joining in.
  5. Rails is a web framework that is actively maintained, used by big websites like Basecamp, Github, Gitlab, Shopify and many more. It is a framework developed to solve practical problems and offer pragmatical solutions for everyday developer tasks. It inspires me to a calm rhythm of development that covers many needs for you.

There might be other reasons to learn Ruby and Rails (or other Ruby web framework) and I will write about them in deep in the next articles I will publish here.

This is somehow a guide I cobbled together with the following objectives:

  1. The first part will be about “Understanding what Ruby is, why choose Ruby, and where to learn Ruby”
  2. The second part will be about “Understanding what Rails is, why choose Rails, and how to start learning the Ruby on Rails web framework”
  3. Then, I plan to give you some ideas of projects to build while learning Rails
  4. At the end, I will have some recommendations of communities, developers, and blogs to follow.