Learning Ruby on Rails: Pragmatic Studio vs. The Ruby on Rails Tutorial

I first started learning Ruby on Rails back in January based on the suggestion of a friend. We decided to complete the Pragmatic Studio Rails course together. I have now successfully finished both the Pragmatic Studio Ruby on Rails: Level 1 course and Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial. I am going to do a brief review of the pros and cons of each course. I found both the courses to be very well-done and professional and both would be good for a beginner learning Ruby on Rails However, that does not mean I would recommend people do both courses. At the end I will offer a suggestion for people trying to decide the best route to take to learn Ruby on Rails.

Pragmatic Studio Ruby on Rails: Level 1
This course costs $149. After some discounts I paid $126.75. Before completing this course, I also went through their Ruby course to learn the fundamentals of Ruby. The course is broken up into 26 different sections and each section has a video and exercises. Text within the exercises section goes over pretty much everything covered in the videos so it is easy to find specific information.

The videos are professional quality and they all feature a husband/wife team. The interaction between the two hosts make the videos more interesting. They break everything down so it is very easy to follow. In the exercise section that goes along with each video, they guide you through creating a project that is similar, yet still different, to the project that they create in the videos. Since the exercise project is different than the one they create in the videos, it forces you to think through things a little more instead of just copying and pasting. This helped me learn the material better.

The project for this course was to make a move review site. Check out the  website I made with this course.

Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial
I completed this course many months later, partly to get a refresher on Ruby on Rails. One of the best parts about this course is that it is free. This course is basically an online textbook and tutorial. The free version does not contain any videos. This course covered a lot of the same concepts as the Ruby on Rails course. However,  compared to the Pragmatic Studio course, it seemed a little more advanced and I got the feeling that the work-flow was more aligned with what it would be like in an actual job environment. I did not complete the Pragmatic Studio Level 2 course but this tutorial covered many topics from the Level 2 course such as users, authentication, and admin privileges.

As far as I can tell, the Ruby on Rails Tutorial is the most popular way to learn Ruby on Rails. Also, Micheal Hartl is constantly updating it. I e-mailed him about a very minor error and he fixed it within a day. While I did not run into any major errors in the Pragmatic Studio course, I feel more confident about the accuracy in Hartl's course just because of it's popularity combined with very quick updates to any mistakes that are found.

One thing that could be a pro or con is that the current version of the Ruby on Rails tutorial focuses on creating a project through Cloud 9, a cloud-based IDE, while Pragmatic Studio suggests to use a local installation. So Pragmatic Studio gives a little more detail on how to install everything locally.

Both courses give instruction on using git, Heroku, and Amazon AWS.

The project for this course was to create a site similar to Twitter. Check out the site I made with this course.

What I would do differently if I had to do it again
Though they are both great courses, if I had to do everything again I would not do the Pragmatic Studio Course. In addition to going through Micheal Hartl's free course, I would join his Learn Enough society for $29.00 /month that includes videos to go along with the Ruby on Rails Tutorial. This subscription also includes other material as well. I did not do this so I cannot speak to how these videos compare to the Pragmatic Studio course but based on how well done the free tutorial is, I would assume they would be very good videos.

One last thing to consider is that the Pragmatic Studio course may be a little easier for people with little programming experience. While both courses give detailed step-by-step instructions, the Pragmatic Studio course breaks down some concepts a little better.