ROS 2 from zero

Twelve parts, in order, from nothing installed to a launch file that brings up a small stack. Each part is short enough to finish in one sitting.

You do not need a robot. Everything here runs on a laptop.

What you need

• Ubuntu 24.04 for Jazzy, or Ubuntu 22.04 for Humble. A virtual machine is fine, though anything involving a GUI will be slow.
• Comfort with a terminal: cd, ls, editing a file, reading an error.
• Basic Python. Classes and functions, nothing clever.

No C++ in this track. ROS 2 is usually taught in C++ first, which adds a compiler’s worth of problems on top of a new framework. Python first means the errors you hit are ROS errors.

The parts

#	Part	Status
1	Your first node	Published
2	Installing ROS 2 properly	Writing
3	Topics, and what a QoS profile is for	Writing
4	Services and when not to use them	Planned
5	Parameters and config files	Planned
6	Launch files	Planned
7	Reading someone else’s package	Planned
8	Custom messages	Planned
9	Actions	Planned
10	rviz without the guesswork	Planned
11	Recording and replaying with rosbag	Planned
12	Putting a small stack together	Planned

Part 1 comes before the install guide on purpose. If ROS 2 is already on your machine, you should be writing something before you read three pages of apt commands.

Which distro?

Pick Jazzy if you are starting now and on Ubuntu 24.04. Pick Humble if you are on 22.04 or following along with a course or a job that uses it. Humble is supported until May 2027, so it is not a bad choice, just an older one.

Where a command differs between the two, the page says so.

A word on versions

ROS renames things. A command that worked on Humble can be moved or dropped in Jazzy, and a tutorial that does not say which distro it was written for wastes your evening.

Every page here says what it was tested against, right under the title. If yours differs and something breaks, leave a comment on that page. It gets fixed and the next person does not lose the same evening.