The voices touting the greatness of Ruby have become too loud to ignore. It’s time to give it a go. So, what’s a developer to do?

Well, this developer did two things. First, I found out how to download and install Ruby on Rails. I chose to use Instant Rails since I’m not a server administrator by trade and Instant Rails is a nice self-contained package that doesn’t mangle my current setup.

Then, after trying a few “hello world” tests (yeah, yeah, I know…”n00b!”), I downloaded the pdf beta book “Agile Web Development with Rails“. It’s been very helpful so far. It’s an excellent introduction that lets you dive right in and start writing code and seeing how it works. That’s the way I learn programming languages, hack, hack, break, fix, “oh, that’s why that broke,” ad nauseum. So if you work that way, this is a good approach.

One word of caution: don’t skim the book too fast and just skip to the parts where they show you code. If you’re reading the pdf beta book, remember that many of the examples use features that are not in the current stable release of Rails. You’ll need to install “Edge Rails” to make them work.

To make Edge Rails work, you need to install Subversion (svn). Unbeknownst to me, svn is the gospel of source versioning in the world of “real programmers.” So for all you liberal arts majors and accidental webmasters out there (like me) who aren’t classically trained as programmers, have a look at how to install Subversion on Windows. Thanks be to Nick Adair, benevolent master of the Unix environment.

That ought to get you started and give me time to come up with some original material.