My favorite development language/framework for the last nine months or so has been Ruby on Rails. At lunch today with my Dad and one of his buddies, the topic came up and I started thinking about how to get people up and running with Ruby on Rails. Here are my thoughts:

Getting it Installed

For OS X and various Linux flavors, I recommend getting Ruby on Rails from the main Ruby on Rails site.

Rails development on Windows is a little more of a challenge, but you can get a reasonable start (at least enough to try things out) with InstantRails.

Editors

You can edit Ruby code with any text editor. I prefer TextMate on Mac OS X, but Komodo and JEdit are reasonable and work on Windows and Linux.

Online Tutorials

This is a little tough at the moment, because Rails 2.1 hasn’t had as many “getting started” tutorials written as the 1.2x versions of Rails had.

There is a long tutorial at Tutorials Point which looks like a good start.

The main Rails site has a page of tutorials and documentation links.

Screencasts

Screencasts are a fantastic way to learn Rails. There is a huge wealth of information here.

Railscasts are a series of over 100 screencasts about Rails.

Peepcode has a number of great quality screencasts for $9 each.

Books

The two books that I recommend most are:

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt, and The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez.

These two books are a great learning and reference combination for Ruby on Rails development.

What are you waiting for? Get learning!

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Originally uploaded by markmorga.

This was a cool panel because it had San Antonio’s own Real Live Preacher. The discussion was focused on unique issues encountered when blogging about religion online - both pro and con.

One big pro was that being online provides an outlet for those who can’t find a religious community that accepts them in their local area. A relative negative was the angry, ugly comments that some people receive. Another mixed fact is that members of your real-life community may have issues with what you write.

The panel caught a little flack from some of the audience for not including the atheistic community, but it was an interesting discussion.

Good user interface means providing for the user w/out then noticing.

Some picking on laha.com

(I believe we left at this point) - we’re pretty good at ruining the user experience already.

This panel was on using the modern design technique of grid layout to improve web site design. This one was good, but would have benefitted from a longer session - 30 minutes was rushed. My notes:

• subtraction.com
• markboulton.co.uk
• 2 dots imply a design
• columns turn to grid
• rationalism < decore + logic, reason
• standardization
• crate & barrel’s web site is a good example
• commentisfree.guardian.co.uk
• yeeaahh.subtraction.com
• 3 or 4 columns in multiples of the base column width - 12 total is ideal