Beginning Rails

In Chapter 2 of Beginning Rails I cover installation of the Rails stack in detail. Perhaps my least favorite part of the installation instructions are those for OS X.

If you’re on windows, you have the famous one-click installer. If you’re on Linux, your package manager will do all the heavy lifting. But if you’re on OS X, the process is a little more involved. Google is more than happy to uncover a multitude of different ways to install Ruby on OS X, none of which are particularly easy for the beginner.

In the book, I resorted to a complete walk-through of installing the Apple developer tools and compiling each component from scratch. This can be a daunting task for the beginner, and though I think I did a pretty good job of breaking down the process, it’s far from painless.

From the book:

You would think that given the prevalence of OS X among Rails developers (the entire core team uses OS X) that installing it would be easy. Alas, it’s not. Due to the existence of a slightly crippled instance of Ruby preinstalled on most OS X 10.4 systems, we’ll go through the steps for building almost everything from scratch.

Fortunately there is now a better way: the one-click Ruby installer for OS X.

This package is the most simple way to equip your Macintosh Apple OSX System with Ruby – similar to the Windows Ruby One-Click Installer. It replaces the broken Readline library, updates to a current version of SQLite3 and prepares your OSX for Rails, which needs at least Ruby 1.8.4 to run. The current Ruby Version is 1.8.6 (1.8.5 is recommended for Rails) and Rubygems 0.9.4.

I’ve had a chance to try it, and I give it two thumbs up. If you’re looking for an easy way to install Ruby and its red relatives on OS X, give it a try. (Of course, if you’re the sadistic type who wants to do everything by hand, nobody is going to stop you).

Beginning Rails is the practical starting point for anyone wanting to learn how to build dynamic web applications using the Rails framework for Ruby. You’ll learn how all of the components of Rails fit together and how you can leverage them to create sophisticated web applications with less code and more joy.

This book is particularly well suited to those with little or no experience with web application development, or who have some experience but are new to Rails. Beginning Rails assumes basic familiarity with web terms and technologies, but doesn’t require you to be an expert.

Topics include:

• a gentle introduction to the Ruby programming language
• installing Ruby and Rails on a Mac, Linux, or Windows
• the philosophy behind Rails and why it matters
• the model-view-controller architecture
• the basics of relational databases and SQL
• setting up a MySQL database and creating a schema with migrations
• experimenting with your live application in the Rails console
• creating rich relationships between your models
• using controllers and templates properly
• leveraging helpers to keep your templates clean and logic free
• adding Ajax and visual effects to enrich your user interfaces
• JavaScript with Prototype and script.aculo.us
• how to send and receive mail from your application
• using and creating your own plugins
• insuring your code against Murphy’s Law through writing tests
• using Capistrano to deploy your application

Rather than delving into the arcane details of Rails, the focus is on the aspects of the framework that will become your pick, shovel, and axe. Part history lesson, part introduction to object oriented programming, and part dissertation on open source software, Beginning Rails doesn’t just explain how to do something in Rails, it explains why.

Every programmer fondly remembers the book that helped them get started. The goal of Beginning Rails is to become that book for you, today.