Learn Ruby Easy - Hey N00bs This is for you!

[Miguel]

I'm a newb here and also in terms of actually making big cash I haven't done that either but I will and this has helped me a lot recently, with just understanding basic concepts of ruby and programing in general.

Well I have been wanting to jump into ruby recently considering all the hype around RoR ( Ruby on Rails ) and I found this GEM the other day, I am currently reading a book on PHP and hadn't wanted to learn anything else at the same time but the blog entry and the comments on this thing were astounding so I had to bite and try it.
Well needless to say this little training tool thing-a-ma-jig is fucking awesome.
It even made understanding some of the PHP concepts I have been trying to wrap my head around finally fall into place.

it's still in beta I believe but give it a download, it even includes it's own integrated ruby real-time environment too.
It was designed so even little kids could learn so all the newbies stop whining and get to learning how to code.

go to Hackety Hack: the Coder's Starter Kit

And get started do something that will finally get you out of your whoa is me bullshit and get you moving.
http://hacketyhack.net/
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Apologies if this was posted before but I did a search and didnt see it anywhere.

 

[mason]

hmm nice... I've heard of RoR, but never really looked into it. This should be fun.

 

[DavidR]

Looks like it was created by Why (.c( whytheluckystiff )o.). He's one of the best Ruby developers in the world. Definitely do all you can to learn from him and you'll be fine.

 

[kduru2000]

Is there a IDE for building sites with ROR?

 

[Dirvan]

I use TextMate on Mac (costs money) but you can use RadRails, it's free.
Aptana: The Web IDE

 

[Miguel]

Looks like it was created by Why (.c( whytheluckystiff )o.). He's one of the best Ruby developers in the world. Definitely do all you can to learn from him and you'll be fine.

Yeah I really am enjoying it DavidR, it just lays it out in such an easy to understand manner.

His blog seems to be a great resource too.

 

[juanvh]

Ruby on Rails is an excellent framework for quickly and efficiently developing web apps. One thing to be careful of is that when you deploy an app, you need a lot more resources than a standard PHP app.

Many web hosts will sell you a setup where you use FastCGI or (even worse) a CGI based interpreter to run Ruby on Rails apps. This works, and you get terrible performance (every page view must load the entire 40MB rails stack into memory, render the page and then unload the stack). You'll also bring your server to it's knees very quickly.

If you are going to deploy Rails websites, make sure you use a host that specializes in Rails hosting - you need a pretty unique setup to get good performance from Rails, and this setup isn't compatible with cPanel, Plesk, etc that normal hosts would use. One I know about but never used is TextDrive.

If you are going to look for a host, and do not know what to look for - the words "mongrel" and "load balancer" in their feature list is almost essential. There's more than just this, but if you have a good host, they will take care
of the details so you don't have to.

 

[mason]

hmm I get errors running through the tutorials.

 

[Miguel]

hmm I get errors running through the tutorials.

yeah I got a couple, he's still got it in beta,:error: I got a few of those too, but I just restarted it and it worked fine, for me.

 

[DavidR]

I would stay away from TextDrive. I've had nothing but problems with them. I still have some Rails apps with TextDrive, but they don't do anything at the moment.

For my current Rails hosting, I use MediaTemple. I have one Grid Container hosting plan and one Dedicated Virtual hosting plan. Both are really quick.

I have had some issues with them, but all of them were resolved quickly. If you go the dedicated route, you really need to know what you're doing to set up Rails apps yourself.

I go with the Apache+Mongrel setup.

 

[am1r]

Slicehost.com are probably the best I've seen so far. They give you a VPS and you can install all your gems easily enough as well as set up a Mongrel cluster. As a rule of thumb, you can put about three Mongrels on their entry level offering (256mb). Running your own VPS might be a bit daunting for newbies, but honestly if you have a serious app you want to deploy then my experience is that you rarely get enough access to do what you want in most managed hosting environments (or you get the access but through layers of inefficient requests etc).

The other point I wanted to make is that don't just learn ROR but also learn to use Ruby as an alternative to Perl or Python for scripting stuff. It really is good and you can do in 30 lines of Ruby what it might take 100 lines to do in Perl (for example). Check out Scrubyt, for example, and how easy it is to generate xpath-driven scrapers and I'm sure you will be impressed.

As for IDEs, then I use Radrails (on Windows) but you can also use E (textmate clone) or Jedit (can be configured to become a Textmate clone).

 

[Miguel]

hey Am1r thanks for that radrails link, I'm dowload and play with that a bit.

 

[aim]

The guy who wrote that, "Why", he's a crazy character. If you want to read something really f--ked up, try his "Poignant Guide to Ruby" -- it's a BIZARRE introduction to the Ruby language (no rails here, pure ruby).