Revisiting Rails: Setting up on Windows

I've built my first Facebook application and now I'd like to take it a step further. Not being a fan of PHP, I took a look at what other people are using to build their Facebook  applications and I was delighted to find that some use Ruby on Rails.

I studied Ruby on Rails when it was first made public and the hype was at its peek. I just never got around to actually using it in a serious project. I'm just glad I can come back to Rails now.

Here is how I was able to set it up on my old Windows XP laptop:

I downloaded and installed the Ruby One-Click Installer

Using the command line, I updated the ruby gems using:

gem update --system

I had a feeling it will take some time so I proceeded to install a database for development. I went to http://www.sqlite.org/download.html and downloaded the command line program and the dll: sqlite-XXX.zip and sqlitedll-XXX.zip where XXX is the latest version which at this point in time is 3.6.20. I extracted the files to the ruby bin directory which by default is located at C:\ruby\bin

I'm also going to need a source code management tool and now seemed like a good time to learn about git. I went to http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list to download the latest version of the windows git installer. Afterwards, I ran the full installer to install git.

By this time, the gem update process has finished and I proceeded to install
rails and the sqlite3 ruby bindings using:

gem install rails sqlite3-ruby

For a lightweight text editor, I found Intype which is still in early alpha. It seems
like a small, fast, and flexible code editor for Microsoft Windows with an intuitive and easy to use interface.

With the setup finished, I'm going to proceed to study using the following free resources and non-free books:

• Learn to Program 
• Free online tutorial for people just learning to program
  
• Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby 
• Free introductory book to the Ruby Programming Language
• Ruby Users Guide
• Free English translation of  the guide to learning Ruby written by the language creator
  
• Git Community Book 
• Free book for learning about Git
  
• Getting Real
• Free primer on the agile approach
  
• Ruby on Rails Guides
• Free online collection of guides for Ruby on Rails
• Ruby on Rails API
• Free online Reference for the  Ruby on Rails API
  
• RSpec API
• Free online Reference for RSpec

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