learn ruby on rails

http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/

Two experienced computer scientists doing a free online Ruby on Rails course. Listen to the podcasts to get a general feel of how the framework is set up and the conventions used by Rails. Some excellent and clear advice here.

I had a full day of it yesterday. I got the bugger to install using that BitNami Rubystack installer. But then when I tried to work on the Hello World thing it kept saying that some of the gems were missing. In the past I would have given up at this point, but I persevered.

I uninstalled the whole thing and started from scratch with the command line. Had a look at hivelogic’s site where you a mkdir and set up a new directory for all the new files. Took forever to install everything – Ruby, Rails, Gems, Mongrel, Subversion, MySQL, Capistrano. But then that didn’t work either. I later figured out that the port was busy from the other install but other than that it all loaded fine.

Next stop was Locomotive. Which didn’t download properly the first time. But I hooked that up with MAMP (which I already have for PHP dev) and I was away. You can change the port in there and I finally got round to the hello world exercise and got to bed about 2.00 am.

Found some Ruby podcast lectures by some lecturer at a US university. It’s cool how he’s managed to put slides into itunes. So while files were downloading I was doing that.

So, I’m on my way.

I read the Agile Web Development book a while back but didn’t manage to install Rails so I gave up at that point. But I just downloaded the Rubystack from BitNami and I’m up and running. I’m very keen to follow the tutorials in the book now.

Another step forward towards creating my own Rails apps.