The Self-Taught Developer

How to become a back end developer

Updated:

Command Line

The command line, or terminal, is the 2nd most important tool you need to learn as a developer. You are going to be using this tool all day, every single day as a developer, so you need to learn it well.

Git

Git is immensely powerful and to truly master it takes a very long time, however, you really only need to understand some of the larger principles and features of Git to use it... for now.

Ruby

Oh boy do I love this language! I never thought a programming language could look as beautiful as Ruby does and be so much fun to write and work with. Do you know why that is? Well it turns out that the creator of Ruby Yukihiro Matsumoto aka Matz designed the Ruby language with developer happiness in mind. Sounds crazy right!?!? As he was designing the language he kept what it would feel like for the developer to work with, read, and ‘be in’ Ruby for hours at a time. In my opinion Ruby is just a treat to be able to work with, Matz knocked it out of the park!

So in this lesson we are going to learn all about the Ruby programming language. Once we understand Ruby we are going to move onto one of the most powerful and popular web frameworks, built upon Ruby… Ruby on Rails. Just wait until you see all of the amazing things you can built with Ruby on Rails. However, before we get there, you really need to have a solid grasp of the Ruby language itself. Do not rush through this section, take your time here.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails took the world by storm when it was first realized and I personally believe it is the reason you have all of these startups everywhere and such an explosion of web applications. It’s creator David Heinemeier Hansson aka DHH shocked the world when he first presented Ruby on Rails back in 2005. Rails has come a long way since then and it still holds its ground as one of the greatest web frameworks out there, across all languages. Since you just learned Ruby and I know you have fallen in love with it, because how could you not? We are now going to learn Rails and start to build our own web apps!

Rails has been since 2005 and there are a tremendous amount of tutorials out there, which is fantastic! However, it can be really hard to know where to begin. So follow what I have laid out for you here, in order, and you will be just fine ;)

Previous
How to become a Front-End developer