Looking to learn Rails but hoping to stick with Win7/xp as all of the machines I work on run one of those two OSs. Would hate to be stuck to my laptop for development b/c its the only machine I have running ubuntu. Am I shooting myself in the foot by trying to learn rails on windows?
Looking to learn Rails but hoping to stick with Win7/xp as all of the
machines I work on run one of those two OSs. Would hate to be stuck to
my laptop for development b/c its the only machine I have running
ubuntu. Am I shooting myself in the foot by trying to learn rails on
windows?
No, but starting out use Instant Rails or the like… even though when you are learning even getting things fully working on Mac can take a bit of a learning curve, but at least on Mac you have a lot of support… that said, if you really fall in love with Rails, do ditch windows and if you have the choice avoid deploying on Windows server, do it! Also you may want to consider using a Linux vm (i.e. Ubuntu) on your windows machines… another option.
I haven’t had a chance to try this out, but it looks very promising. http://railsinstaller.org/
it was featured in an article on Ruby Inside http://www.rubyinside.com/rails-installer-ruby-and-rails-on-windows-in-a-single-install-4201.html
Ben Giordano wrote in post #976696:
Looking to learn Rails but hoping to stick with Win7/xp as all of the machines I work on run one of those two OSs. Would hate to be stuck to my laptop for development b/c its the only machine I have running ubuntu. Am I shooting myself in the foot by trying to learn rails on windows?
Yes. Windows is not a suitable platform for serious server-side software development. At the very least you'll want a *nix VM.
Best,
I have been developing in Windows for a while now and it's true that there is no much support or love for it in the RoR world. If you really want to keep going with Windows, though, if I were you I would get the rubyinstaller and DevKit right away from Downloads. To install DevKit follow instructions at https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller/wiki/Development-Kit.
Most of the problems I have had working with Windows were because of the DB adapters.
To work with MS SQL you will need 2 gems: activerecord-sqlserver-adapter ruby-odbc
Working with MS SQL you will probably want to stick to ODBC so you will need to create a System DSN. In Windows 7 first try to create it the regular way but it probably will not work. If it does not work then you will need to delete what you just created and then use the executable at C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe. This is the 32-bit version.
To work with Oracle you will also need 2 gems: activerecord-oracle_enhanced-adapter ruby-oci8
Good luck
Genius, thank you all for your great responses. I have been lurking around many resources online and feel like Ubuntu is the best way to go for learning rails. Will take a bit of work to get up and running but seems like a much better decision in the long run.
thanks,
Ben
if you are looking into using Ubuntu, check out this screencast http://www.rubyinside.com/how-to-install-ruby-1-9-2-and-rails-3-0-on-ubuntu-10-10-4148.html or use the one line installer http://www.rubyinside.com/ its the latest article.
Jason
Ben Giordano wrote in post #976992:
Genius, thank you all for your great responses. I have been lurking around many resources online and feel like Ubuntu is the best way to go for learning rails.
Actually, Mac OS is probably the best way to go, but Ubuntu will work well. I've also heard good things about VirtualRails, which is a Mint Linux VM with a Rails dev environment preinstalled.
Will take a bit of work to get up and running but seems like a much better decision in the long run.
Yes. (Anything that lessens your use of Windows is probably a good decision.)
Miscellaneous tips: * Use RVM. Use RVM. Use RVM. * On Ubuntu, install gems through the Gem program, not the system package manager (even if you're not using RVM). * Do all development test-first, preferably with RSpec and Cucumber. Avoid Rails' built-in fixtures at all costs; use factories instead. * Use version control religiously (I highly recommend Git). * http://www.railstutorial.org and http://www.railscasts.com are invaluable. * The hidden advantage of Rails is the Ruby language. Learn it very well. http://www.railsapi.com , besides presenting the Rails docs more readably than the official site, has the Ruby standard library docs in the same format. Win. * Don't try to use a Rails 2 book to learn Rails 3. * Learn SQL well if you don't already know it; likewise for database normalization strategies. ActiveRecord exists to aid DB access, not to obviate learning SQL. * Always use the Foreigner gem to create foreign key constraints in your DB. The lack of core support for this is a major oversight in Rails, which is why Foreigner is so useful. * Rails tends to make good things easy and bad things hard. If it's hard, you're probably doing it wrong.
Good luck! Rails development can be exhilarating.
thanks,
Ben
Best,