Day One of Learning Rails. Hello World Not So Easy.
Well, I have taken the plunge into learning Ruby on Rails. I’ve been toying with learning rails for the last month or so and have even attended a local user group meeting. Yesterday I finally put some real effort into it.
I had picked up a copy of the (so far) awesome book Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
So the first chapter is some fluff talking about the Model-View-Controller architecture and the Don’t Repeat Yourself philosophy. Of the very few things I have read about Rails lately, these are always talked about. The author is better than most, so it was good to get a coherent rehash. I skipped the acknowledgments part.
By chapter two we’re into the good stuff. We hear about what the MVC architecture really is, in the nitty-gritty. We hear about Active Record and how it is the ORM layer supplied with Rails and how it makes database queries a thing of the past.
In chapter three we learn what I really wanted to know: how to get started. Now, I understand there are probably a wide variety of ways to do things, but the author suggested a certain way and I followed it with great luck. Basically, the trick (working in a Windows environment) was to install InstantRails. I got the download from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=904. Basically, you are going to unzip this to a clean folder (with no spaces in the path) and run everything from the self contained environment.
Finally, in chapter 4 I was able to get the server running, my application created and my Browser saying “Hello Rails!”.
Very Exciting stuff. All in all, I am very pleased so far. I look forward to learning more.
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