Are there any similar resources for learning Ruby on Rails? In particular I’m looking for technical books with narrative.

these are the things I often recommend to folks getting going with Ruby & Rails

• _The Well Grounded Rubyist_ (https://www.manning.com/books/ ... dition). This is a great intro to Ruby - it groks the vibe of the language  well IMHO.
• _The Rails guides_ are a good way to get going with Rails. I (and I'm guessing many other folk on here) still refer to them pretty regularly. The are a good balance of the right amount of info to get most things done with Rails
• _The Rails Way_ (https://leanpub.com/tr5w)  is great when you need to go deeper than the guides. It's not much of a narrative tbh but does a good job of contextualising the very large surface area of Rails

I do agree Rails is easier on beginners but do not fool yourself there are a lot of things to learn, and you will have to be good full stack developer to make quality applications in the Rails. Some experience coders like to customize everything, but there is a problem with that - not all people agree on the best way to customize a framework and you have to think about the business value of software once you move to better things. I will give you an example: Johnny is PHP developer, and he organizes his project based on his 10 years of experience. Johnny loves his design it is so awesome! Johnny for next 2 years works on the project, and he gets bored with it. Then he finds another project and moves on. Then comes Tommy also 10 year veteran in PHP and he is in charge of maintaining Johnny's code and sees it and says "This is no good we have to build this from scratch" just because he does not like that organization. This happens a lot! So convention over configuration FTW

I am not a RoR developer and in fact have just barely looked at it. But one thing I am definitely jealous about is along the lines of what you mentioned in the video: The fact that all decisions are made for you. This really shows as a major difference when you compare Ruby to the Javascript community (my main platform). JS has a bazillion tools, frameworks and libraries. And to get a job or claim an expert level in JS, you really need to have experience with more than one of each. For example, for running tasks the original heavy hitter was Grunt, so we all learned that. Then 6 months later, Gulp stole the spotlight and so the community quickly threw out wrapper packages for everything to support that and we all ported. Now, another 6 months later, there seem to be people going back to just writing npm scripts for everything. So you can see just for one small use-case (running tasks) we have had 3 major solutions in under 2 years. Things get much crazier when you start talking about frameworks and the learning curve goes up exponentially. But it seems in the Rails community, there is one major tool for every problem and you are expected to use it. That is great provided the tool meets your needs. There are less things you need to know to check-off "Rails Developer" on your resume which is a definite plus for beginners. And there is less upheaval in the community.
 

if you are really beginner in "how to code" or maybe web development, dont jump directly to Rails, trust me, you'll get lost. Instead, learn some basic algorithm on how web works, OOP and so on and then try to make your simple web application in PHP. After you make some project, you'll get more problem solve skill, understanding the essentials then you can choose another backend framework that maybe more powerful, like Laravel, Django, and sure, Rails.

"Learn what you're paid to use," I've said before. I've had more recruiters ask me about RoR lately than anything else, which blows my mind. I agree, there's a lot of behind-the-scenes magic, so I think it helps to learn enough JS/HTML/CSS first to help understand why RoR does what it does. It also can act as a bridge to understanding MVC conventions, which helps if you add Angular to your quiver later.

Rails is the 'Bootstrap' of Ruby. Get good at Ruby vanilla first. Who cares if Ruby is newcomer friendly, the point of it is to focus on problem-solving and getting things done as opposed to the more rigid languages. Oh and for those who keep saying to learn Javascript instead, I would hope your already familiar with it, if your a web developer. Should go without saying, learn both. Both are just as easy as each other.

Let me tell you right now Airbnb and Kickstarter are using reactjs and redux. Personally I have seen many website moving from Ruby on rails to Reactjs one such example is Codecademy, where I first started learning code and right know they have moved there code base to Reactjs from Ruby on Rails. My advice is if you are learning for just making some cool project then only go for Ruby on Rails but in case you want to be professional in web development then go for JavaScript based framework/ library such as Reactjs or AngularJs or Vue.js for frontend and nodejs for backend this is the best bet for now.