Learning Ruby on Rails

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As it stands now  I m a Java and C  developer  The more and more I look at Ruby on Rails  the more I really want to learn it     What have you found to be the best route to learn RoR   Would it be easier to develop on Windows  or should I just run a virtual machine with Linux     Is there an IDE that can match the robustness of Visual Studio   Any programs to develop that give a good overhead of what to do  Any good books     Seriously  any tips tricks rants would be awesome

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I have found  The Rails Way  by Obie Fernandez excellent and often found myself referring to it when Agile Web Development with Rails didn t seem to go far enough  Obie Fernandez has a decent blog too

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I m currently learning RoR  here s what I ve done so far    1  Read  and followed  SitePoint s  Simply Rails 2 2   2  Read  and followed  Oreilly s  Rails  Up and Running  2nd edition   Those two books are very instructive  and take the same approach in different styles  the second book is a little more aggressive  which is good if you have some RoR knowledge    As posted above  be extremely careful when reading resources  there are A LOT of outdated videos and articles

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Book   The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez  IDE    Netbeans or TextMate

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I learnt Ruby with the help of Mr  Neighborly s Humble Little Ruby Book  It s an excellent free-to-download introduction to Ruby with lots of examples  which I d 100  recommend

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I asked the same question when I started out - hoping for a somewhat prescriptive guide on learning Rails    couldn t find one so decided I would write one for others who might find themselves in a similar boat one day    You can find it here   Best Way to Learn Ruby  amp  Rails   It s now actually returned with the  learn factoid helper in the official Ruby on Rails IRC chat room

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0  LEARN RUBY FIRST   This is very important   One huge advantage of Rails is Ruby  a great language that is very powerful but also marvelously easy to misunderstand   Run through a few Ruby tutorials online   When coding challenges come up on Daily WTF  write them in Ruby   You ll pick it up fast   1  Go buy the book  Ruby for Rails   2  Check out a Rails tutorial and subscribe to the Riding Rails blog   3  Standup an app locally   Don t use scaffolding   4  When you install plugins into your app  go look at the code in that plugin  in your vendor directory  and learn it   It is one of the best ways to learn Ruby and Rails internals   When you don t understand how something works  post it here and 1 000 people will help you   As for your other questions   Yes  you will need a Linux environment to develop in   You can develop Rails on Windows  but that doesn t mean it should be done   Lots of gems aren t up to speed on Windows   NetBeans works well as an IDE   If you re on a Mac  you ll get street cred for using Textmate

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I m learning Rails now and if you re using Windows  assuming so with C  dev  I highly suggest learning on Linux if investing in a Mac is not an option   If you don t want to to create a separate Partition on your HDD for Ubuntu  I suggest checking out Wubi  a Windows installer for Ubuntu  The Rails experience is much less of a headache on Ubuntu than it is Windows and I d argue is similar to that of an OSX dev environment  just not as much application support  I m currently using a alpha text editor Redcar  which allows you to have some of textmate s functionality  the popular OSX editor   Good books I ve read on Rails are Beginning Rails 3 by Cloves Carneiro Jr and Rida Al Barazi  Also Rails Test Prescriptions by Noel Rappin  about developing in a test-driven approach   My favorite things to keep me moving from amateur to notive are Railscasts by Ryan Bates  He usually releases a screencast every Monday or so about Rails gems  or recently Sass  SCSS  Coffeescript and technologies related to Rails 3 1   A must read for any beginning programmer I feel is why s  poignant  guide to ruby  Unfortunately  why disappeared just as I was getting into Ruby  but his content is still scatter accross various sources  It has quirky humor and by the end you ll know Ruby s syntax quite well

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My suggestion is just to start - pick a small project that you would generally use to learn an MVC-style language  i e  something with a database  maybe some basic workflow   and then as you need to learn a concept  use one  or both   of  Agile Web Development with Rails or The Rails Way  to learn about how it works  and then try it   The problems with Agile Web Development are that it s outdated  and that the scenario runs on too long for you really to want to build it once  The Rails Way can be hard to follow as it bounces from reference to learning  but when it s good  it s better than Agile Web Development    But overall they re both good books  and they re both good for learning  but neither of them provide an  education  path that you ll want to follow  So I read a few chapters of the former  enough to get the basic concepts and learn how to bootstrap the first app - there are some online articles that help with this as well  and then just got started  and then every few days I read about something new or I use the books to understand something   One more thing  both books are much more Rails books than they are Ruby books  and if you re going to write clean code  it s worth spending a day learning Ruby syntax as early as possible  Why s Guide to Ruby is a good one  there are others as well

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I bought the book  Simply Rails 2  by Patrick Lenz  This book is a great introduction to Ruby and Ruby on Rails  As for my ruby installation and db  I used Cygwin  It comes with PostgreSQL  ruby and svn  I like PostgreSQL because I come from an Oracle background so it feels more comfortable than MySQL     The other utility I found really useful was pgAdmin for accessing the PostgreSQL databases   The first thing I needed to do was to get gems installed  I got the gems tar file from rubyforge wget  http   rubyforge org frs download php 60718 rubygems-1 3 5 tgz     Once I had gems setup  I installed    rails ruby-postgres postgres rack    I also needed an issue tracking system so I installed redmine  wget  http   rubyforge org frs download php 60718 rubygems-1 3 5 tgz     I found that using a UNIX-like environment  Cygwin  was preferable in my case because many of the tutorials were taylored for OS X or Linux     The text editor I use is Textpad   I m looking for an alternative  I think that vim with the rails plugin might work nicely

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I think the screencasts and short books from Peepcode are really good   They have screencasts to get you started and have some as you get more advanced

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There s a very solid ongoing series on NETTUTS right now that you may be interested in

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Path of least resistance    Have a simple web project in mind  Go to rubyonrails org and look at their  Blog in 15 minutes  screencast to get excited  Get a copy of O Reilly Media s Learning Ruby Get a Mac or Linux box   Fewer early Rails frustrations due to the fact that Rails is generally developed on these   Get a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails  Get the version of Ruby and Rails described in that book  Run through that book s first section to get a feel for what it s like  Go to railscasts com and view at the earliest videos for a closer look  Buy The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez to get a deeper understanding of Rails and what it s doing  Then upgrade to the newest production version of Rails  and view the latest railscasts com videos

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This looks like a great resource for people like me who are coming from PHP to RoR  http   railsforphp com  There s also a book Rails for PHP Developers

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Without a doubt  Agile Web Development with Rails  and  The Rspec Book  and for fun  Advanced Rails Recipies   I would link to the other two  but Stack Overflow won t let me   See the same site

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Once you get your environment up and running  this is helpful in giving you a basic app that users can log into   Restful Authentication with all the bells and whistles  http   railsforum com viewtopic php id 14216 amp p 1

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To learn Ruby  read  The Well-Grounded Rubyist  by David Black  It is extremely clear  well-written  and well-organized  The best technical book I ve ever read  out of maybe a dozen  since I m a relatively new programmer    To learn Rails  read  Head First Rails   They explain how all the mysterious parts work together  Be patient with the silliness and work your way through the examples - it will pay off   Also  for consistency  use whatever version of Rails they use  You can upgrade later    Both of these books assume little to no knowledge on your part  regarding OOP programming and MVC architecture  If you do know a bit  don t skim  because you might assume things incorrectly   For instance  Ruby objects don t have public attributes  only getters and setters  But you can automatically create multiple getters setters with a single line like attr accessor  attr1   attr2   attr3

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There is a site called Softies on Rails that is written by a couple of ex- NET developers that may be of some use  They have a book called Rails for  NET Developers coming out in the next few months     I started out on a Windows box using the RadRails plugin for Eclipse and the RubyWeaver extension for Dreamweaver  back during the 1 x days of Rails   Since then I have moved to a Mac running TextMate and haven t thought of going back   As for books  I started with The Ruby Way and Agile Web Development with Rails  It definately helps to build a background in Ruby as you start to make your way into Rails development   Definately watch the Railscast series by Ryan Bates

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My first suggestion would be to learn a little about symbols first  Rails isn t the smallest framework ever  and while there s definitely lots to learn  most of it will start to make sense if you have at least a little bit of understanding what makes it different   special   from other languages  As pointed out  there s no exact analog in any of the major languages  but they re heavily used by Rails  in order to make things read straightforwardly and perform well  which is the reason I brought it up  My very first exposure to Rails was also my first time looking at Ruby  well before 2 0   and the first thing that caught my eye was the goofy  things they were passing around  and I asked   WTF is that     Also  check out RubyQuiz  and read other peoples  answers on that site

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I have got up to speed with Ruby on Rails fairly quickly via this free online course which is currently being offered by UC Berkeley - Software as a Service - Engineering Long Lasting Software with instruction by Armando Fox and David Patterson  I can t speak highly enough of this course    it really was a privilege to learn Rails from these guys  And there is an active community on the course forums if you run into difficulty along the way  The first offering of the online course has now finished  as of 25 March  2012  - the next time it will be run will be sometime in September of 2012   It assumes you are a fairly competent developer and gets you started on ruby in the second week  then Rails runs from the third week up to the end of the course  five weeks   Your assignments are marked by an auto-grader  You get provided with a pre-built Ubuntu VM image with everything you need for development pre-installed on it  e g  Ruby  Rails  Rake  Gems  RSPec  Cucumber  etc   All you have to do is start up the VM inside the  free  VirtualBox software which runs on MacOSX  Windows and Linux    There is a recommended text book for the course     here     but you may be able to get by looking at the lectures and screencasts online

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I ve seen the infamous  Blog in 15 minutes  video ages ago when Rails was probably around version 1 0 or something like that  One of the most important things about the Ruby Rails world is that given it s great community it s changing ridiculously fast in comparison to other frameworks   Today  Rails is significantly different that what it used to be  altho the main ideology has been kept the same  Having said that event tho in the lsat few years I ve learnt a lot of things about Rails I still keep learning new things about it   The most valuable resources to me that help me discovering and keeping up with the latest ways of doing Ruby and Rails are the following    Rails Guides - A nice way of learning Rails itself  edited by the community  moderated by the core contributors  The site has a lot to offer on most of the important main topics around Rails that it can get you up and running very quickly  It covers bot the most recent stable and edge versions of the framework  If you understand the main ideology of Rails than I definitely recommend checking out  and subscribing to  Ryan Bates  Railscasts  Let me just quote from the site itself  I think it s pretty self explanatory      Every week Ryan Bates will host a new   Railscasts episode featuring tips and   tricks with Ruby on Rails  These   screencasts are short and focus on one   technique so you can quickly move on   to applying it to your own project    The topics target the intermediate   Rails developer  but beginners and   experts will get something out of it   as well   There are also a lot of podcasts around Ruby Rails  the two that I keep listening to are  Ruby5 and the Ruby Show  For more specific questions like API calls etc  I d recommend APIDock s Rails and Ruby sections where you can get more information on specific methods  If you are getting more familiar with the framework  it s worth taking a look at Rails Best Practices  There s a bunch of short articles on certain issues that most people make in the beginning of their learning curve with Rails  This site is meant to point pot these issues and help beginners finding their way towards writing better and more well thought out code  There s also a gem that you could use which scans your application and points out these issues and offers solutions workarounds  Pretty neat    These resources should help you in getting up and running with Rails  Good luck with your journey to the Rails world and welcome to the community

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Just to  1 Agile Web Development with Rails  though make sure you get the latest edition  - http   pragprog com   I develop on a Mac and this can soemtimes be beneficial - it s quite a popular platform with Rails developers so many of the blog posts you look at will be mac-orientated  Linux is great too though     Finally - and I have no connection with the company at all - when you do have something you want to put live  heroku is a good choice  Finding a cheap rails host isn t easy so this is a nice starting point  There are a lot of other great hosts out there too though  Heroku does kind of require git for version control  though you can use it on top of subversion    Best of luck

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I wrote a post called  Getting Started With Rails -- What I wish I knew  that many people found helpful   The basics    Agile development with Rails  book  InstantRails for quick ruby rails environment on Windows Aptana as the IDE Subversion for version control   The online tutorials are decent but scattered  Invest  30 in a book for a more comprehensive understanding

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I agree with srboisvert  Don t do it on Windows  You can add Ubuntu  version of Linux  to Windows and have dual boot  It requires some work  but it is easier than going against the grain and trying to get everything working on Widows    Ubuntu  Heroku and Git work wonderfully  Just know the learning curve is steep at first  Hire someone from Guru com or Elance to help you    Also  running Textmate on Mac is the preferred solution  so if you are considering getting a Mac or have access to one  that is the best thing to do  I don t think you need very much computing power     Finally  my favorite book is Agile Web Development for Rails  Googling around doesn t work so well because most of the information is from old versions of Rails and is deprecated or doesn t work

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The fastest way to learn anything  Ruby on Rails included  is pair programming    Find someone who knows Rails  pick an example app  sit down  and work through fixing bugs  adding features   The knowledge sharing is unbelievable

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Some awesome advice here   Some of the resources I will list have been mentioned  some I don t think were   I am definitely still not a pro  I ve just been learning for the past few months and I ve been improving at a rapid rate   This is what helped me in order    Why s poignant guide to ruby  excellent introduction to the Ruby language by the infamous  why  Agile web development with rails book  great book with some good in-depth follow alongs Rails tutorial by Michael Hartl  railstutotrial org   this has been my favorite resource   Hartl s style of walking you through demo apps and explaining everything just made things click for me  Rails for Zombies - ran through this twice  great for reinforcing the basics  Railscasts - I started following this along at first  but they were not helpful until now that I am just really starting to grasp Rails   I would leave these for the end after you have got your feet wet   Think Vitamin s rails tutorials were also pretty good  I followed along these screen casts at first  to feel out the language and then did them again towards the end  The  Learning Rails  podcast  although outdated  Rails 2  was also a good starting resource  I listened to this while driving working out    I hope that was helpful  I m far from being a pro  but I dove in head first and absorbed as much as I could from multiple resources   The ones I mentioned above were the most helpful   Oh and what s really helping me now is coming up with personal projects and settings certain tasks   Following along is great  but you truly learn when you dive in without a guide

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I m surprised there has been so little mention of Why s  Poignant  Guide to Ruby  Why may not be around anymore but the guide is easy to find on the net  Google points here first  it s a very easy read and provided my introduction to Ruby   After the guide  I d recommend either one of the books the others have suggested  or following  the series of screencasts at Learning Rails which is how I picked up enough Ruby on Rails to be dangerous  Once you ve completed the Learning Rails series  what you want to do with Rails will start to diverge from the general tutorials and that s where Railscasts becomes a wonderful tool  There s not much can be done with Rails that Railscasts hasn t touched on at some point

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IDE  NetBeans Book  Agile Web Development With Rails Installation  Instant Rails

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I program with RoR on the Mac OS with textmate  and it s awesome   I would suggest  Programming Ruby 1 9   The Pickaxe Book  for Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails  to learn Rails  both published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf   Good luck

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I really enjoy RubyMine from Jetbrains  It seems like a very full featured IDE something I miss from many of the other alternatives out there  Also for a simple env I enjoy e the text editor  Plain and simple

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Beware  the rails world is a massively frustrating mess of outdated and inconsistent documentation and examples   It is maybe one of the fastest moving and most faddish development communities there is   By the time you learn something it will already have changed   Even the books are not consistent in which version of rails they are talking about   Documentation by blogging   enough said     I currently do RoR on windows   My advice is to avoid windows if you can   Lots of things don t work and the rails community really really doesn t care about you   The move to Git has really messed me up since it doesn t work very well on windows   A lot of gems will fail because of this  Heroku looks like a cool tool - too bad for me it can t handle window s Git setup    Capistrano is out   It goes on and annoyingly on   Plus  in the back of your mind  you always wonder when something doesn t work  Is it a rails windows problem    I am not sure this is solved by using linux because linux brings its own hassles like constantly having to upgrade all those different dependencies  etc   If that s the kind of thing you enjoy it might be an okay choice for you   Those days of enjoying system fiddling are behind me and I just want to get on with doing my work   I am planning on installing ubuntu on a home machine just so i can get familiar with things like capistrano so maybe my opinion will change   I d highly suggest if you are going to do rails dev for any amount of time you seriously consider getting a Mac   If you value your time and sanity it will pay for itself almost instantly   Depending on how you value your time 10 hours of debugging windows linux setup problems and you have spend as much as a Mac costs anyway   Rails is a joy compared to what it replaces but it is a bit of a pain in that its proponents skip right past a lot of the boring but important stuff like documentation  compatibility issues and community building   It is way more powerful than other frameworks like Django but I sometimes look over at the Django documentation and community and sigh like a guy with a wild sexy girlfriend looking at his friend s plain but sane and stable wife   But then rails adds a feature and I go  Ohhh shiny    IMO the Rails Screencasts are better than the Peepcode screencasts   RubyPlus also has screencasts  mind you  they are bit rough around the edges   BuildingWebApps has a free online course that starts doing screencasts halfway through

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I come from a non-programming background  I have learned PHP on my own and recently joined a firm that specializes in Ruby on Rails  They have a comprehensive Rails training program  which is flexible enough to accommodate whatever changes we want to implement  Though I am not a rails pro  I would like to share my experience with rails  I hope that it helps   Here is the path I am following  combined with tools I am using    Start with a simple ruby guide  It will help a lot  since entire rails framework revolves around classes and objects  Environment and OS are not important  Though I am working on a Mac  I frequently work on Linux and Windows  and I do not face any problems  Start with a good book which explains using a demo app   I am using Agile Web Development with Rails - By The Pragmatic Bookshelf   There are many other good books as well  Once you are done with the application  you will have a good idea of the framework     Try to understand the SQL queries generated by Active Record module   Go through the Rails Guides  You will find the framework a lot easier   Keep practicing    Few imp points   It takes years to learn a language completely  So be patient and do not stop learning  Go through rails api as when required   While developing your first app  Google the things which you do not understand  People have written great articles on almost all topics  Use Stackoverflow  -   Only when you are not able to find the solution on your own   Load railscasts on your phone or video player  Watch  em while travelling or in your free time  They are of few minutes each  You will learn a great deal of things and also learn the best way of doing things    Tools   Shell  in Mac and Ubuntu  Editor  Textmate in Mac  Gedit in Ubuntu and Notepad   in Windows  Firefox with Firebug installed for testing    Finally I have one thing to say  Keep trying   All the best

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Oh I almost forgot   Here are a few more Ruby screencast resources   SD Ruby - the have a bunch of videos online - I found their Rest talks SD9 and SD10 to be among the best of the intros   Other rest talks assume you know everything   These ones are very introductory and to the point   Obie Fernandez on InfoQ - Restful Rails   I ve also read his Rails Way book and found it informative but really long winded and meandering and the quality is a bit inconsistent   I learned a lot from this book but felt it was a bit punishing to have to read through the repetition and irrelevant stuff to get to the good bits     Netbeans is a nice hand holding IDE that can teach you a lot of language tricks if you have the patience to wait for its tooltips  it is a painfully slow IDE even on a really fast machine  and you can use the IDE to graphically browse through the available generators and stuff like that   Get the latest builds and you even have Rspec test running built in   Bort is a prebuilt base app with a lot of the standard plugins already plugged in   If you download it and play with it and figure out how it is setup you are about halfway to creating your own full featured apps

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This is also a good read http   guides rubyonrails org

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Ruby  I used Learn to program  in a weekend   Ruby Visual QuickStart  believe it or not this QS  book was  off the hook  excellent   This took about a week   Rails  I just went through Learn Rails in one  aggressive  week  Definitely feel I have the nuts and bolts  It s 2009 which I deemed important   Now I plan to combine a more advanced book with a real project    IDE  VIM with rails plugin is great if you re a vim addict  Otherwise  try any suggested above   Of course railscast  etc   are useful for most up to date stuff

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The Book Agile Development with Rails is the number one teaching aid   It s got a nice life-like ish  application it builds up through the chapters as it introduces you to different concepts   I worked through the examples twice  after which I had enough knowledge to do my own stuff and rely on the rails API documentation  http   api rubyonrails org

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Read all the guides at guides rails info  starting with Getting Started with Rails They are well written  well organized  and up to date

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I came from a Java background to Ruby to   I found this tutorial helpful http   www ruby-lang org en documentation ruby-from-other-languages to-ruby-from-java   When it comes to learning rails I cannot say how much I use script console   It allows you to play with the code and learn how to do things that you are not sure about   The only book I ever bought was Agile Web Development with Rails  Third Edition http   www pragprog com titles rails3 agile-web-development-with-rails-third-edition   It was quite useful and provided a good overview of the Rails framework   In addition to that I regular watch Railscasts http   railscasts com   which is a great screen casting blog that covers all kinds of Rails topics   I personally prefer using Linux  because git works better    But  I have also used windows and besides git I do not think the OS choice will impact your programming     I use netbeans for my IDE and occasionally vim  with the rails plugin    I like netbeans but  I find that it can still be a little flaky when it comes to the Rails support  not all the features work all the time

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http   railsforzombies org  is a nice one  Introducing an all new way to learn Ruby on Rails in the browser with no additional configuration needed

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I ve been moving from C  in my professional career to looking at Ruby and RoR in my personal life  and I ve found linux to be slightly more appealing personally for development   Particularly now that I ve started using git  the implementation is cleaner on linux   Currently I m dual booting and getting closer to running Ubuntu full time   I m using gedit with various plugins for the development environment  And as of late 2010  I m making the push to use Vim for development  even over Textmate on OS X   A large amount of the Rails developers are using  gasp  Macs  which has actually got me thinking in that direction   Although I haven t tried it  Ruby in Steel gives you a Ruby IDE inside the Visual Studio world  and IronRuby is the  NET flavor of Ruby  if you re interested   As far as books are concerned  the Programming Ruby  also known as the Pickaxe  book from the Pragmatic Programmers is the de-facto for learning Ruby   I bit the bullet and purchased that book and Agile Web Development with Rails  both books have been excellent   Peepcode screencasts and PDF books have also been great for getting started  at  9 per screencast it s hard to go wrong   I actually bought a 5-pack   Also check out the following    Official Rails Guides Railscasts railsapi com or Ruby on Rails - APIdock The Ruby Show Rails for Zombies Softies on Rails - Ruby on Rails for  NET Developers Rails Podcast Rails Best Practices   I ve burned through the backlog of Rails and Rails Envy podcasts in the past month and they have provided wonderful insight into lots of topics  even regarding software development in general

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Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Ruby    Bruno R  Preiss      Published in 2004 Learn to Program    Chris Pine   Pragmatic Bookshelf    Published in 2006  176 pages Mr  Neighborly s Humble Little Ruby Book    Jeremy McAnally      Published in 2006  147 pages Programming Ruby  A Pragmatic Programmer s Guide    David Thomas  Andrew Hunt   Addison-Wesley    Published in 2000  608 pages Rails in a Nutshell    C  Fauser  J  MacAulay  E  Ocampo-Gooding  J  Guenin   O Reilly Media    Published in 2009  352 pages Ruby Best Practices    Gregory T  Brown   O Reilly Media    Published in 2009  328 pages Ruby Essentials       Techotopia    Published in 2007 Ruby on Rails Security    Heiko Webers   OWASP    Published in 2009  48 pages Ruby User s Guide    Mark Slagell      Published in 2005 The Book Of Ruby    Huw Collingbourne      Published in 2009  425 pages The Little Book of Ruby    Huw Collingbourne   Dark Neon Ltd     Published in 2008  87 pages why s  poignant  guide to Ruby    why the lucky stiff      Published in 2008

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As you  I m a java C  developer trying to learn more Ruby On Rails   I m taking the free online course Ruby on Rails Programming with Passion  is a good introductory course  check it out    We are using NetBeans as IDE  win mac linux solaris   if you are used to Eclipse or Visual Studio  there is a good chance you will like it

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Try this book http   ruby railstutorial org ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

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A lot of good opinions here  I ll add what s not here  My experience    Rails on Windows is easy to get going with RailsInstaller  especially if you re using SQLite   If you want to use Ruby gems which need C extensions  e g  RMagick   installation is difficult and unpredictable   PostgreSQL is a pain to install on Windows  and a pain to hook up to Rails   git doesn t work quite right on Windows   IDEs are bulky  Aptana   Notepad   is good enough   Rails on Ubuntu is easy  and gems requiring C libraries just work   If your computer is powerful enough  use VirtualBox or VMWare Player  and use an Ubuntu Virtual Machine     Setup Resources     This page shows  start to finish how to set up Ruby Rails PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 11 10   If you don t like RVM  I don t   use rbenv  RVM and rbenv are tools for managing multiple versions of Ruby  including JRuby  Rubinius  etc     Live Deployment for Development Testing   Live deployment lets your friends try out your app  It also makes it easier to interact with web services which need to make callbacks to your Rails server  such as PayPal IPN or Twilio    Heroku com is my favourite place to deploy   localtunnel com is a good utility to point a publicly visible URL to your local Rails server   I have only used it for Windows-based Rails servers      Learning   Try out tutorials on the web   Use stackoverflow com to ask questions  Use  raise Exception  params to s   in your Controllers to stop the app print out all the parameters which are driving your controllers  This gave me the greatest insight on how data is schlepped back and forth in a Rails app   Use the Rails console   rails console   to inspect data  and try out code snippets before you embed them in your models or controllers

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I actually have an article about getting started with rails that should help   The only part of your question it doesn t cover is the OS   Mac is the dominant player here  believe it or not   But I use Ubuntu happily   There are gedit plugins that get you very close to TextMate - in fact  I like gedit better   If you re on a windows machine and can use linux  that s definitely a better way to go   Rails on Windows has a lot of issues

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Find a nearby Ruby users group and start attending that   I ve found that is a great way to meet a lot of people who are passionate about development and willing to teach

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Good link for learning Ruby    http   en wikibooks org wiki Ruby Programming

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My steps was     Agile development with Rails  book    Railscasts - very useful  always learn something new    And of course the RoR API

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I ve found http   railstutorial org book to be a great resource for learning Rails

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My company has been developing mavenlive com  a knowledge management and decision support platform for three years   Over the past few years we ve learned a lot about rails and here are some of my recommendations    Switch to Mac   The tools that are available to you and the development environment on Mac allows you to be far more productive than on Windows  railcasts com has a wealth of informative screencasts from beginner to expert   You can always find new and more efficient ways of doing things from Ryan s posts  Scaling Rails screencasts coupled with NewRelic has provided powerful insight into the performance of our application and allows us to develop effectively while keeping our eyes open for future scalability issues

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An excellent source for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails is at http   www teachmetocode com   There are screencasts that cover the basics of Rails  along with a 6-part series on how to create a Twitter clone with Ruby on Rails

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The ubber source for anything Rails is http   www rubyonrails org  if they don t have it on the site you probably don t need it   A quick cookbook is Ruby on Rails  Up and Running you can get it from O Rielly or search Google for a on-line version  They walk you though the conventions of Rails and use Instant Rails which is ok   A better Rails book  Agile Web Development with Rails  This is the soups to nuts of Rails  It walks you though downloading and setting up Rails  Gems  everything   If you want are a Java  guy  and want a transition book O Reilly has  Rails for Java Developers  http   oreilly com catalog 9780977616695  CMP AFC-ak book amp ATT Rails for Java Developers

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Wait a couple of months for Learning Rails by Simon St  Laurent  Edd Dumbill to come out in November   That series of books is stupendous  and this book will cover the latest version of Rails

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I used to do Java and C  on Windoze   I d second these sources   IDE  Try Apatana RadRails 3 Sneak Peek  http   www radrails org 3  Its the closest thing you ll get to Visual Studio  I play with it here and there but still love the lightness of Textmate   OS  Mac OS gets the most if not all love from Ruby community  Anything else is treated like a bastard child   Books    The Pragmatic Programmers  Guide  the pickaxe book  Agile Web Development with Rails   Screencasts    Peepcode  pay  is a nice way to pick up concepts quickly Railscasts  free  is a good weekly way to pick up new gems and concepts incrementally Railscasts  pro  is also a good way to pick up concepts for a pretty low price

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Railscasts shmailcasts     1   Think of some type app that you d like to develop it  2   Take 20 minutes to napkin out some user flows 3   Read the first couple of chapters of  Agile Web Development with Rails  with your project in mind 4   Install Netbeans and rails on your windows or mac machine   Either is just the same  5   Develop your app 6   Consult the bajillion and one online references as you develop

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Fantastic decision  It is extremely useful to get a grounding in Ruby before going to Rails so here is my take on the best path to Rails    Learn to Program by Chris Pine - You can read this in an afternoon to get a feel for the Ruby language  The Well Grounded Rubyist by David Black - Like the title says it will give you an excellent grounding in the language  Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen - This book is sublime  it reads like a novel  Ruby Best Practices by Gregory Brown - By this point you should be ready for the advanced level of this book  Rails for Zombies - Fun tutorial you can complete in an afternoon  Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl - Fantastic  and free  tutorial and I have heard his accompanying screencasts are amazing  Agile Web Development with Rails by Sam Ruby - By the time you are finished this you are now a completely capable Rails person    Aside from books the most important thing is to get feedback on what you are doing  To do this I recommend spending time in irc freenode net  ruby and  rubyonrails  It is also extremely helpful to post things you are working on or having trouble with here on stackoverflow as the comments  explanations and different way of thinking about things that people provide are invaluable   You should also definitely check out the Ruby Rogues podcast  they provide invaluable information and the commentators are all extremely respected people in the Ruby community  And for your viewing and reading pleasure  in that order   head over to Ryan Bates s Railscasts and  then Eifion Bedford s Asciicasts   Finally  I recommend looking into different gems on github  reading the code and then contributing to them  You don t have to get overly ambitious and do massive recodes  especially at first  Just start with small things like editing and making the README files a little easier to read   I don t use an IDE but at Railsconf I saw a demo of Rubymine from Jetbrains and it seemed pretty amazing

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Another IDE you could try is Aptana

[ruby-on-rails] Learning Ruby on Rails

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