First, there is an incredible breadth of free and paid online coursework you can use to keep going on. The following list are ones we recommend (as does Rails Girls internationally) that cover most topics you need to actually make something:
- Codecademy is a great series of interactive tutorials designed to teach you the basics of programming.
- Try Ruby as you've seen is an introduction to the Ruby language - it assumes some general programming concepts, but it's important to understand Ruby and not just Rails (which sits on top of it).
- Code.org is an incredible program designed to encourage Computer Science among high school students. I highly suggest checking out their video and their learning page - which links to many online resources that have free programming tutorials.
- Coursera and Udacity are two online university-style teaching places, with coursework and the like. Both cover a huge range of topics, but importantly include basic through advanced computer science courses which serve as a good introduction to programming.
- Khan Academy also covers a large range of topics as well, but notably has a very well designed interactive computer science course which covers many of the basics in your browser in an environment that is great for experimentation.
- Rails Tutorial is an excellent free tutorial (with Paid versions available, including videos) that walks through building a Rails app from scratch in a lot more detail.
- The RailsApp project has a bunch of general documentation as well as focused tutorials going in depth on specific ideas, well worth checking out.
- Better Frontend similarily has a bunch of guides on building better versions of the front end of your application, so you're not just focused on the backend part of it.
- The Rails Girls guides are worth continuing on with, as they cover a lot of different scenarios that follow on naturally from where you got to.
- How to continue with Programming from the Rails Girls guides is especially useful, linking to a large collection of other resources.
- The Official Ruby on Rails Guides cover, in depth, quite a bit about different aspects of Rails - explaining things such as sending email, database migrations and most common scenarios - They can be tech focused at time, but they cover a lot when you want to know more about how a specific part of Rials works.
- Rails Casts are short videos each covering a specific topic - incredibly useful when you have a specific problem you need to solve.
- Martin's guide to the command line is a great place to understand more about the command line / terminal based interface.
Finally, our slides from the day are available at:
And, from other rails girls events, an Intro to UX guide that you may find useful.
Perth has a fairly active tech community, and we highly encouraging checking out some of the different meet ups going on:
- RORO Perth is recently-revived, once a month meet up bringing together the Ruby community. The next night will be a hack night in December.
- Port 80 is the Perth web industry meet up, run once monthly.
- Perth Django Users is the Django (an alternative to Rails written in Python) user group, and it's useful if you wish to compare and contrast the alternatives.
- HTML for Hustlers is run by Marcus & Jay - Whilst not a free event (Attendance is $50), it is run as a not-for-profit event, with fees serving to cover costs for the organisers. I highly suggest checking this out if you want to learn more about the frontend portion of development, which is incredibly useful.
- Morning Startup is a meet up for the more startup side of things, and very useful for meeting other people in the perth startup community.
- Global Day of Coderetreat is another hack-day style event, Hosted by ThoughtWorks in Perth, coming up on December 14. If you'd like more information, contact Diana from ThoughtWorks at diana.adorno@thoughtworks.com.
- Startup Weekend is a roughly-biannually run weekend-long event that puts people through the process of building and testing a Startup.
- Mobile Beers is a mostly social, pretty technical meet up over social drinks. Held monthly, the next one is a Pub Crawl - Thus making it Mobile Mobile Beers.