Rails: Where to start? <Big City Without a Roadmap>

Question

So, I'm still a young developer, but I am trying to endeavour into Rails and server side development. Up until now, I have only ever worked on native application programming (iOS, OSX, JAVA (.jar), etc.).

I jumped into a few Ruby tutorials and then Rails tutorials. I found it straightforward to go through the Ruby tutorials as Ruby has an awesome syntax, but when I jumped into the Rails tutorials, most of it assumed having knowledge about HTML (I have a basic understanding, but not much that I can credit) and other web components. It felt overwhelming, however I was fine to go through just understanding the rails part of the tutorial.

All this being said, I don't know what to do to continue learning rails from here on out. I feel like I'm in a huge city without a good roadmap, so I am trying to ask the pedestrians/cityfolk (you guys!) what I should be doing now.

I would love to be able to just write up rails applications without having to build a website along with it (just simple API calls for some of my applications even). However, everything about this is foreign to me and I would just like to know where I need to go from here.

If this isn't the right place to ask a question like this, I'm sorry! Hopefully someone can direct me to an appropriate site, if thats the case.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT

I have provided an answer myself that I believe to be a solid solution to my own problem. If people could let me know the validity and worthiness of my answer, it would be greatly appreciated. I would like to accept the best possible answer to help any beginner web developers looking to learn Rails, like myself.

Answer 1

I've been googling around and I found a pretty good way to start on the Rails (Ruby on Rails) journey.

Start off by completing the tutorial on this site to get a basic grasp of Ruby. You can also check out this book if you want a ground up approach or you're new to coding.

After you've worked through that, you should check out the free Rails tutorial to get a small taste of rails.

Both of those tutorials (I can't say the same for the book) are excellent and will probably have you laughing the whole way through as well.

After you've done those two steps, moving onto this Rails tutorial e-book will get you on the right track.

From there, you should feel a lot more comfortable and you will have the necessary resources to continue learning Rails on our own!

I really hope this can help anyone who was in the same boat that I was (Zero clue about anything!).

Answer 2

Rails really is for web-apps/sites/apis. That being said have look at RailsCasts and ApiDock