New to Ruby on Rails

Question

Hi,

I'm new to Ruby on Rails and was hoping people can assist with the following:

1) Tutorials for the complete newb to RoR?

2) How to get RoR up and running on Mac OS X (10.5.8) - where and how to install?

3) Can RoR work with an Oracle 10g backend and if so, how?

Would really appreciate your help on the above.

Thanks.

Answer 1

1. Ruby on Rails tutorials

2. Installing (with ruby gems)

3. No idea

Answer 2

It is important that you understand Ruby before trying to use RoR. Rails is just a framework that works on top of Ruby. If you want an interesting take on learning Ruby, check out Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. There's also Try Ruby! which is an interactive tutorial that lets you code in your browser as you go through it.

Once you are comfortable with Ruby, Railscasts has a series of (currently 233) screencasts dealing about various aspects of Rails. There are also the official Rails guides which cover a variety of topics.

I've never tried it before myself, but the Oracle manual has a section on Ruby on Rails.

Answer 3

For rails, there is this new site put up by the evangelism team http://railstutorial.org/

The problem with rails is because it moves very fast, books tend to go out of date very quickly. Aparently, railstutorial is supposed to stay up to date with the current stable version (starting with 3.0)

I am assuming you don't know ruby either. Personally, I came for rails, but stayed for ruby. It is an incredibly interesting language you can go very deep with. I would highly recommend The Well Grounded Rubyist by David Black, I bought loads of books starting out, but that one was by far the best for someone who doesn't already know ruby. While the why book is awesome for many reasons, the david black book will get you further, faster.

Haven't done rails on oracle before, but this looks fairly up to date.

As for setting up your stack on OSX, I would recommend checking out homebrew, as well as the tutorial links you get from other answers.

Answer 4

To get Rails up and running on OS X it's fairly simple. Just update RubyGems by opening terminal and entering "sudo gem update --system". Once that's completed you should run a similar command to update the rest of the RubyGems "sudo gem update" and that should get you up and running.

There is a one-click installer for Ruby 1.8.7 if RubyGems requires it which is likely. http://rubyosx.rubyforge.org/. I wouldn't go for Ruby 1.9 just yet as a number of Gems don't support it.

Answer 5

For Oracle support, You definitely want to check out oracle adapter made by Raimonds.

Answer 6

You should ask one question in one question.

Your first two questions are being asked over and over again. If you are not aware, there are quite many good searching engines, perhaps you could try google, or even you could search SO.

Your third question, take a look here (I just put rails oracle 10g in google and it was 4th link!)