The last week has seen a flurry of activity in the Ruby and Rails world where there is a buzz about geting newbies up and running easily. Some of these are new ones, while others have been around for a little while but as I’ve not come across them before I wanted to make sure I noted them down here for later use.

RailsBridge is a new project underway as a resource for people to learn Rails via a variety of paths and tools. Over time new practicals and tutorials should appear that people can follow to learn Rails and Ruby.

Rails Tutor will provide the courseware for RailsBridge in a number of bitsize chunks that people can work through as needed. It should cater to those who are new to programming, as well as those who have done programming before and are just new to Rails and Ruby.

Ruby Challenge will provide exercises and games in Ruby to make learning fun. This could be the nice ‘extra’ to the whole RailsBridge package. If it works well, then this will be a bit of fun to add to classes for students.

While watching the mail list for RailsBridge I saw a few interesting sites pop up, which I should mention here too.

Ruby Learning (.org) provides a number of on-line classes for people to take, and provides mentors to help people with the work. This looks quite useful for guided learning.

Ruby Learning (.com) provides a class in Ruby that is all there laid out for you, and you can work through it yourself and read the notes at your own pace. In addition to the on-line tutorials, you can also download an e-book that looks like it goes over the same material.

Ruby at About.com also provides a lot of materials and how-to guides for those learning Ruby as well as Rails. This covers obvious resources, plus adds more of its own too, which is nice. They will also be helping out with RailsBridge too.

All in all, it’s a good time to be learning Ruby and Rails.