Free RoR help and the official Ruby and Ruby on rail chat rooms

[tiger86]

This is not an advertisement, this is purely a thread telling people about resources that I've found, well resourceful.

For those who are stuck with Ruby on Rails or need to learn the basics you should check out the free videos by Ryan Bates at www.railscasts.com, they've helped me a few times and I've heard that they help a lot of other people. Also if you ever need help right away you can always go to the #ruby irc on freenode or if you are a ruby on rails programmer go to #rubyonrails also hosted on freenode. I know for a fact that #rubyonrails is the official help irc for anything related to RoR. Everyone on the #rubyonrails chatroom are usually very helpful and can help you when your stuck.

Well I hope that this post helped!

[tiger86]

Here is some info I left out on Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is basically like Microsofts .net, except rails is an extension of the Ruby language. Some say that you should learn Ruby before learning Ruby on Rails, I say do whatever works for you.
If you want to develop Ruby on Rail Apps you can do it in windows but it is a pain and really, really annoying. I would suggest installing Ubuntu on a seperate hard drive and downloading the newest stable version of RoR from www.rubyonrails.org. They have step by step instructions for installing RoR. If you decide to use Windows, despite my warning you will have to use a much older version of rails.

Simple do and Don't rules for Ubuntu and Ruby on rails
Do not use apt-get that is not the right way to install RoR.
All you need to do is install the latest RubyGems file then go into the terminal and type gem install rails. Walla, you now have RoR.

Simple tutorial: Building a simple app.
I have copied this small section of text from the official Ruby on Rails Guide on getting started
Note you only have to use the $ sign in the following example if you are using windows. Ignore it if you are using Linux.
"Open a terminal, navigate to a folder where you have rights to create files, and type:
$ rails blog"
After you create the blog application, switch to its folder to continue work directly in that application:
$ cd blog
If you don’t have any database set up, SQLite is the easiest to get installed. If you’re on OS X 10.5 or greater on a Mac, you already have it. Otherwise, you can install it using RubyGems:
$ gem install sqlite3-ruby
Now that you have your database configured, it’s time to have Rails create an empty database for you. You can do this by running a rake command:
$ rake db:create
One of the traditional places to start with a new language is by getting some text up on screen quickly. To do that in Rails, you need to create at minimum a controller and a view. Fortunately, you can do that in a single command. Enter this command in your terminal:
$ script/generate controller home index
4.1 Starting up the Web Server

You actually have a functional Rails application already – after running only two commands! To see it, you need to start a web server on your development machine. You can do this by running another command:
$ script/server

that is all I will copy from the official getting started guide. If you have any trouble with this and you are using Windows don't forget to add ruby before script/generate.
If you want some good literature on RoR, I would suggest Agile Web Development on rails.
I own a copy of that book and read it all the time. Well, I hope this helps and becomes a sticky!

[craiggles]

I'd just like to add that the official Ruby irc channel is irc.freenode.net#ruby-lang, and that irc.freenode.net#RubyOnRails can be aliased as irc.freenode.net#ror

[tallship]

The info above is a great launchpad to Ruby resources. To add a few more, I've also assembled the following links for myself, and will share them here.

I hope everyone finds these resources useful :)

The Ruby Wiki at Wikibooks

The Ruby Quickstart guide

The official Ruby site

Web based Ruby shell for getting started

An excellent "Learn Ruby" free tutorial

I've found that drawing upon several resources provides an introspective from various points of view and offers the greatest opportunity for understanding.

Rather than skill building from a single source, an interdisciplinary approach using multiple learning methodologies tends to answer many questions more quickly and strengthen the skills of the up and coming programmer.

Kindest regards,