david giesberg dot com

As part of my mission towards becoming some sort of a freelancer/web-worker as I finish college, I thought it would interesting to learn more about web software technologies - Ruby on Rails seemed to be the one that I had heard the most about. My coursework experience leans more towards lower-level stuff like C/C++, Java, and assembly, so RoR is way outside of anything I’ve ever done before.

So far, most of my time has been spent trying to get some sort of development environment up and running, which has been a big pain for a number of reasons. Initially, I was working in Ubuntu, but there were all sorts of problems with getting RadRails (an Eclipse-based development environment) up and running (and talking to MySQL), so I’ve switched over to Vista (which can run on my laptop, since I bumped up the RAM from 512 MB to 1.5 GB). I’ve gotten a lot farther with Windows, here is the setup as it stands:

• Eclipse with the Aptana Studio & RadRails plugins installed
• InstantRails (a drop-in system that runs Apache, Ruby, and MySQL)

Something that would have saved me a lot of trouble when I was getting started would have been knowing that the leap from RoR 1.2 to 2.0 would break most of the Ruby on Rails tutorials online. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some of the most referenced tutorials out there wouldn’t work on my setup; seems like most of those material (at least for beginners) was written about two years ago. (For the curious: Scaffolding as done in Rails 1.2 is very different from 2.0, I’m not entirely clear on why, so I won’t guess)

Once I was able to clear that up, I worked through one tutorial and I’m feeling pretty good about this stuff. Went over to the bookstore and picked up Simply Rails 2 by Patrick Lenz, which is apparently one of the few books out there that covers Rails 2.

Hopefully, I’ll have some time to work through this stuff over the next few weeks and maybe I’ll write the next hot Web 2.0 app. Easy, right?