Bret McGowen is a software developer at Rackspace, designing and building RackConnect, which lets customers have the best of both traditional and cloud hosting.

For most of my professional programming career I have worked with the .NET framework. However, a recent side project prompted me to learn the open source Ruby on Rails framework. As you might imagine, there are some major differences between Ruby and .NET, but there are some compelling reasons to learn Ruby on Rails. Through my journey, I found some great resources for learning Ruby on Rails, and whether you are a seasoned developer or simply taking the first step into learning the framework, here are some of the ones that I found extremely helpful.