Noobie Questions

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi, I am former Visual Basic developer who's been resting on his laurels for a while. And now finding that in order to work must learn a new technology.

RoR looks like a great tool set to learn. And, finally, after many years in a ms environment am excited to work in a clean and fresh environment.

Just ordered some Ruby/Rails books - as recommended on various websites. Joined this list (obviously) and prepped my Mac.

I'd like to learn by making an app that's interested me for a while. Possibly spending a couple or more months over it.

Has anyone on the list got anything to share about their own experiences of getting to know their way around RoR? Particularly interested to hear about which resources / tools you use, and how you did your learning - working through or dipping into a book. Stuff that was particularly hard to get your head around.

Basically looking for tips and things to think about.

Thanks! And if there's an FAQ I should be reading, please point me there.

2

Shauna

Thanks so much for all that info.

"Agile Web Development with Rails" is one of the books on order. I have a PDF version, but find it much, much easier to use a hard copy.

Do you use RadRadails? I've been playing around with TextMate, but would prefer to use a more enhanced IDE, so am looking at RadRails.

Lots of reading to do!

cheers Toby

3

hi shauna

i use radrails for editing and instantrails for the http and mysql server

if you like textmate, syntax highlighting and line numbers there is a textmate skin for radrails which do it http://drnicwilliams.com/2006/08/08/textmate-theme-for-radrails/

4

Hi Toby,

Welcome to Rails! As a VB guy, you might find my blog helpful, aimed for people like you and me that used to use VB or C# (or like me, still do for their day job :slight_smile: Use the Search box at the top to search for topics, because unfortunately we lost our categorization when we moved to a new server last week. I would recommend our series of articles titled "Why Rails" which explains why we as Microsoft developers became enamored with Rails instead.

Anyway, For IDEs, RadRails is worth a try, but I also suggest RideMe (www.projectrideme.com), or even Scite, which comes with the Ruby one-click installer that you probably already used to get Ruby on your machine.

And definitely be familiar with the official Wiki (http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails) which can help save you some time, too.

Jeff www.softiesonrails.com