So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

I develop more for fun .. i develop in ruby 1.9 and test to see it works in 1.8.7 also. No big deal!

I use "gem" for installing gems. Not bundler. No need to confuse someone new with RVM and ask him to play with all versions of ruby till he finds the one that suits him.

Its like asking a Java developer to try out all versions of Java starting with the 1.0 version, or asking a python developer to try jython and IronPython in addition to the 2 or 3 current versions.

What about perl. Should a new developer try out perl 4 and perl 6 too first ?

I want my first app to be:

    puts "Hello world"

Any good tutorials or docs?

Want to try model airplanes ? Get ready to spend a couple of days just to figure out the various materials, radios etc

Want to try computer assisted music ? Which plugin ? Which host ? How do I write music with this, etc ?

You could even rewrite the article for Java a few years back at least (should I go WebLogic ? WebSphere ? TomCat ? Struts or something else ?).

Yes, the number of choices in Rails has proliferated, but a new user can easily ignore these choices. I don't think the situation is at all equivalent to the Java stack (which is the only other one I can comment on).

To use Java, you probably want to use Maven, Spring for dependency injection, an MVC framework (Struts 2, Spring, Tapestry, etc...), an ORM framework (probably Hibernate, probably with JPA?), though there are other choices.

This blog lists a bunch or Rails/Ruby choices. However, it's important to keep in mind that essentially all of the things a newbie needs to get started with Rails are in a single, self contained framework that is (in my opinion) incredibly easy to use.

I had well over five years of Java experience when I took on the latest in Java-based web framework. A book on Struts 2 covered Spring, but not Maven. A book on Maven covered MVC, but used Spring's MVC. A book on Spring MVC used Ant for the build, not Maven. Ultimately, I had to spend a great deal of time researching these technologies to just get my first simple app up and running. You should spend some time getting to know your framework and not just rely on magic. But should you have to do this for weeks or even months before you can write a simple webapp?

For rails... well, there's absolutely no need to worry about JRuby, IronRuby, or Ruby Enterprise, and whatever tutorial you're doing on Rails will tell you what version of Ruby you need. You don't need to download any of that windows crap mentioned here. You can ignore Sinatra for the time being. Gems are utterly simple to use (try adding a Maven dependency some time, especially one that doesn't have a public repo). You don't have to download any database to get started with rails, but you will have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to configure applicationContext.xml in Spring (or however you decided to go about it).

In fact, I think you can be a successful web apps developer with Rails and never bother with anything other than the basic defaults (ok, you'll want to use a different database).

Ok, I realize I've been ranting. But there's a huge difference between a proliferation of choices that can be ignored, and a proliferation of choices that have to be understood and dealt with before you can write your first app.

Then go dig into Ramaze. Strong helpful community around a durable, lightweight web framework that works as well for single-file web apps as it does for anything large and sophisticated.