Best way to get started with Facebook and Ruby on Rails

I'm looking to develop my first Facebook application and therefore looking for some advice on where to get started.

I've spent a few hours browsing Facebook's Developer Wiki, Facebooker library, looking at the sample chapters in "Developing Facebook Applications with Rails" by Pragmatic Programmers, etc.

Since FB is consta开发者_如何学运维ntly changing their API, and Facebook Connect is newer than the aforementioned book, does anyone have any advice on where to get started?

Create a Facebook app and new Rails app and play around with integrating Connect using Facebooker.
Getting these components to work will help you understand the FB application configuration process, loading the appropriate javascript files, and figuring out how to read the FB session in an Rails app.

Once you have that figured out try creating a normal FB IFrame app.

One of the things that I think is super important is to try to keep your focus pretty narrow when getting started. If you try to tackle learning: ruby, rails, facebook api, facebook gems, web development, html, css all at the same moment you'll probably get burnt out and give up. Holy smokes that's a lot of stuff to learn! The trick you should do is figure out how small chunks until you get it a little, then move onto the next thing. Keep your goals super small.

How I would do it if I were you:

• Start by building a new rails application
• Then learn how to build a landing page in rails
• Then make it look good with html and css
• Then learn how to make it better with something like bootstrap (and learn about gems)
• From there you could look into calling a simple API from facebook, and the facebooker gem.

Getting started with Ruby on Rails is something that is a little daunting at first, but after you get started it gets a lot easier. After running Ruby on Rails bootcamps for Startup Accelerators, Harvard Business School, in Times Square, Boston, and Pittsburgh, I started http://www.firehoseonline.com. It's a video tutorial to get started, so you should check out that site.

My advice is to learn as much as you can by actually writing the code. Don't get caught up too much in the details and the specifics. If a tutorial gives you some code to write, and some information, and you don't absorb all the information at first, keep going. Afterwards go back to the material, and once you have gone through the whole process of writing your first application a lot of the pieces will fit together.