As I went without home Internet Access far so very long, I decided to start learning something that I wanted to know for quite some time–to build websites with Ruby on Rails. So, I bought a couple of books and installed everything I needed to develop RoR on my MacBook.

RoR has been a lot of fun so far even though I haven’t built anything useful for my self yet; I’m still wading through the books I bought. In case your wondering, I purchased Agile Web Development with Rails and the Ruby Cookbook. I purchased both of those books based on Robert Evan’s (a brilliant Rubyist) suggestion via the Godbit forum.

I’ve been really impressed with the Agile Web Development book. It’s a real must for someone wanting to learn RoR. I haven’t delved too deeply into the Ruby Cookbook yet, but it looks like it has some good recipes. Since I had no object oriented programming experience, I wish I bought book explaining more about Ruby and how to program. I’ve managed okay, but I think I could get more out of the books with a more solid object oriented programming foundation.

To be honest, I’m not an extremely experienced programmer. In college, I used COBOL and SQL quite a bit. I also toyed with VBA, PHP 4, and JavaScript. I know CSS and XHTML not that either can be considered programming. None of those are true Object Oriented languages so the change takes a little getting used to. I think Object Oriented is going to be much better and easier once I wrap my brain around it.

Many of you may be curious how to get Rails up and running on your own computer. Installing Rails isn’t complicated at all–though installing some of the other stuff you need (e.g., webserver, database, ruby, etc.) requires a bit more work (nothing hard). If your using a Mac I highly recommend Dan Benjamin’s Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X tutorial. It looks overwhelming at first, but its really super easy. Simply follow the instructions one by one and you’ll be good to go. I recommend copying and pasting (line-by-line) all of the steps you can to ensure you don’t fat finger something. I just spent some time this weekend updating everything based on Dan’s new tutorial I referenced above. During my first install, I went with Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger. Actually, let me back up a minute. My first install on Mac actually used Locomotive but I didn’t use it for very long at all because building it yourself is a much better method.

If you’re on Windows check out Instant Rails. I can’t vouch for Instant Rails because I’m using Windows, but it should be pretty good because it’s listed on the official Ruby on Rails site.

A couple of side notes:
Ryan Heneise has an excellent list of books on his site.
Robert Evan’s is also developing a new site called Ruby Snips where he (and others) share their Favorite Ruby Snippets. The site is still young, but I look to see some great things come out of it in the future.
You can find me on some Ruby forums at Rails Forms, Ruby on Rails: Talk, and of course my personal favorite Godbit. My alias on each is Mithrill.