Loads of articles about non-technical founders needing to learn to code. Short of pursuing a CS degree, and after Tryruby.org and Codeschool.com, what do you recommend?
Lynda.com has some good training. I'm finding their Ruby on Rails 3 Essential Training to be very easy to follow. I have been programming in PHP for the last 3 years, so I do have some experience with programming, but I think this training would be just fine for beginners as well. It is $25 a month for a basic account and you might find that a little high, but I think it's worth it for the amount of training that you have access to.
I will check this out. I've been amazed at the affordability of available resources and think $25 a month is very reasonable. It's also great to find so many people who are generous with their time and expertise and willing to offer some direction. I love this place! Thanks a bunch for sharing your resources!
Yeah HN is definitely a great community. It's not a bunch of people being snobby and rude like you would find with traditional forums. I've only been a member of HN for about a week, but I'm addicted because of the positive attitudes that the majority of the members have.
By the way, I'm also loving RoR. I went through some training on it a couple of years ago, but I was already set on PHP and didn't take it seriously. Now that I'm actually learning RoR I can't believe I wasted my time with PHP all of these years. I'm not going to say I hate PHP, but RoR makes things so much easier in comparison.
Thanks -that's great information (about RoR) - Hearing from people w/all different coding backgrounds and levels of expertise is a huge asset for us right now. There are so many camps and HN is definitely helping us sort it out and learn to ask the right questions. A friend just told me today that some people have concerns about Ruby's scalability for complex and high traffic apps and sites (which is what we intend to build) - but others swear that's what it's best for... would love to hear your take.
I'm definitely not an expert, but I have been looking at the scalability of RoR as well. Twitter was built with RoR and you can kind of take that as a good thing and a bad thing. They had some trouble in the beginning, but from what I can tell they really didn't consider the scalability when they built it. I think if you plan to have to scale then you should be fine.
Fantastic, thanks! This is right on time for some of the discussions we are having and I really appreciate your taking the time to point these out! Would love to hear if you run in to any more/ anything different on this subject. Thanks a million!
Since you're interested in Ruby, try learning rails. I suggest reading through Ruby Guides' Getting Started[1] and then going through the Rails Tutorial[2], where you make a Twitter clone.