on Jul 4th, 2008Ruby on Rails - Getting started
Every night now, for the past three days, I am sitting religiously in front of my 8 year old desktop running gutsy (both my laptops are’nt with me now 
) trying to learn Ruby on Rails - ror in short. I must say, I have been completely fascinated by its possibilities and look forward to building some really cool and useful apps with it in the near future. I have also been trying to look for tutorials on ror and not finding much help online. A friend of mine pointed me to The Book for ror which I am trying to get my hands on. I have never been the type that learns a new language from a book; I like to get my hands dirty and try out things - thats the way I learn. So, based on my experience learning ror , Im penning down my getting started with ror.
What can ror do ? It makes developing web applications really, and I mean really simple. You give it a table structure and rails automatically builds a table, forms for insert, delete and display for the fields and also build MVC architecture by default. Controllers and views are built and all you have to do as a web developer is to add CSS to the generated files so that they look awesome. There is demo which shows how you can build a blogging engine using rails in under 15 minutes. Now isnt that cool !! Its a really cool hack that has made the job of writing everyday web applications really easy. Well two of my favorite applications online have been built using ror. Check them out .
Well for starters ruby is a programming language - older than java, very english like and mostly interpreted I guess. Rails is this wonderful platform like hack which does a lot of cool things and ruby sits on top of rails and you can build applications using them.
Installation : I found many places which listed installation instructions but this one worked best.
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntu
This brings me to another wonderful piece of software that runs under 400kb, Gems. A apt styled package manager built to get ruby related software.
Once you are setup, I guess its time to learn the language and to learn ruby, I would definitely suggest why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby. Nothing beats this online book … sorry online masterpiece in explaining the aspects of the ruby language. Im still not done with this but I cant wait to read more of it.
Since ror is for web development, its obvious you need a webserver, so you can use the prepackaged WEBrick server ( good for small dev). For more serious programming use Mongrel, Apache or lighttpd. Instructions to configure Apache and Lighttpd for ror can be found here. Get MySql for the database and you will be done.
Lastly you need a very good article to get you started and this is the one that got me started out. Its not perfect considering its almost 2 years old but the errors that show up will help you learn much better. And thats it , we are done. Best of luck learning ror.
Tags: ruby, rails , ruby on rails, getting started, tutorials