Getting Started with Ruby on Rails Tutorial and RailsInstaller
NOTE: I am presently running a PC with Windows 7, which obviously isn't ideal. I'd like to switch over to a Macbook at some point soon, and I will if I can. If that happens, I will note here that I am switching machines.
Upon reaching section "1.2.1: Development Environments", I proceeded to download and install the text editor Sublime Text 2 and RailsInstaller package as suggested for Windows.
Sublime Text 2 installed itself easily, and the RailsInstaller video does a pretty simple and straightforward job of getting you setup. Note that the demo-er is using the VIM text editor instead of Sublime, so his screen will look a little different than yours. One point that took me a moment to realize was that Sublime shows the Rails directories and files in a separate window to the left, while VIM does not. Take care to navigate to the appropriate files being discussed.
The rest of the installer video is pretty straightforward as well. It is worth noting that the Github installation screens depicted have since changed from the time this video was created, but you shouldn't have much trouble figuring it out.
The final part of the video has you setup an EngineYard account and deploy your application through their platform. The RailsInstaller team runs EngineYard, so obviously they're trying to plug it here. Why not, right? The RoR Tutorial has you deploy through Heroku instead, so you can choose to skip this step if you want.
That said, it's probably worth trying out different types of deployment software so, why not? I also recommend watching this video again as you're working on RoR Tutorial's "first_app" (which I will speak about in a later post), as it helped me get through some issues I was having.
RailsInstaller will install Git, Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails itself, so you can just install pik, and then you should be able to skip ahead to section "1.2.3: The First Application". Note that if you are proceeding on a Mac (like I should probably be doing), you'll have to manually install the above. Instead of "pik", you'll be downloading RVM, which includes RubyGems and other fun stuff. I haven't done this, so you're on your own here, but as is with everything on Macs, I'm sure it's fairly simple.
