Part 1: Installation

Just to infuriate some people, these instructions are for a) people as thick as myself, b) windows users. Who said Ruby was elitist?

a) Download the one click installer and run it. I suggest installing it somewhere easy to find (i.e. c:/ruby).

b) Fire up DOS! If you're used to a fancy visual environment, then this might be a shock (it certainly was for me) - you can do it by clicking start, then run, then entering "cmd" and pressing enter. (I said this was a guide for beginners, didn't I?)

c) The one click installation included a very clever set of scripts called Gems, which basically allows you to manage add-ons for ruby through one unified program. We need to make sure the actual Gems script is upto date, which we do by typing:

gem install rubygems_update

and then:

update_rubygems

This updates it to the latest version (at time of writing, 0.8.8) so the next step goes without a hitch.

c) We'll now install the Rails framework, by entering:

gem install rails

Press Y to agree to everything and the installation should complete without a hitch.

Well done, you've now installed ruby and the rails framework!

Introduction

I've always believed that the best way to test (and revise) your own knowledge of a topic was to see if you could teach it to somebody else, and this is what I'm going to attempt to do with Ruby and Rails. There seems to be a lack of decent tutorials that move beyond the basic "Look! Scaffolding!" stage (if that makes no sense, don't worry, I'll explain later) or others waste time explaining very basic programming concepts (like variables or loops). Unashamedly, I intend to pitch this at people at myself: having a reasonable knowledge of another languages (in my case, ASP) and web technologies like HTML but being knew to the whole object orientated business, and thus finding ruby/rails a bit challenging.

There are a couple of important points though:

• I'm a beginner myself. If there's a mistake, I'll fix it - please email me if you see something you think should be changed.
  
• I'm stupid, and like to take baby steps. I'm sorry if that infuriates you, but nothing fustrates me more then when a tutorial author makes a huge leap, failing to explain something important.

If you'd like to help me with this, please drop me a line!

Welcome!

This site will mostly be used for documenting my learning of Ruby and the Rails framework. If you're going to link here, please point to www.codecity.co.uk since this host will probably change soon.