Ruby-on-Rails (RoR): My First Time

• 10 Minutes to Your First Ruby Application
  


• 
  Screencasts of Ruby on Rails


• 
  Hands-on tutorial: Getting Started With Ruby-on-Rails

Tonight was the night for make up for the promise I made myself: learn a new programming language each year. And yes, you're quite right: the language for this year is Ruby, and more specifically - of course - Ruby-on-Rails, or short RoR (*). I read so many times about it that I just couldn't find a reason not to do it. And after a couple hours of looking in the specifics of getting MySQL, PHP, Apache and Ruby to work on my virtual machine (**), check the directory structures that RoR creates, and viewing some .rb file with the SciTE editor, it was just a matter of making some tables in a database, run some ruby commands, and let RoR figure everything out. No need to bother with HTML, web access to your database, the program makes a lot of assumptions, and because of that it's able to lay out the complete underlying structure on it's own.

I encourage you to follow the links, install RoR yourself, and try it out if you have some time (that is: if you haven't already done that long ago, maybe I'm just the last of the Mohican's...). Especially the last link, the turorial is an interesting article that takes you by the hand in building your first RoR app.

(*) If I may count C# as well (where I already knew VB.NET) then my counter is already on 2 this year)

(**) which is b.t.w. the perfect way to try things out on your normal development machine without the danger to break something