Rails for Zombies - Learn Rails from the comfort of your browser(railsforzombies.org) |
Rails for Zombies - Learn Rails from the comfort of your browser(railsforzombies.org) |
1. Install Ruby with your package manager or with the installer for Windows (that's just download, next next next, done).
2. In your terminal: `gem install rails`
Simply following your two step instructions on any of my servers would not create a working RoR setup.
I think there's tremendous value in this kind of site. If someone comes up to you and says "how can I get started with Rails?" now you can just point them to this site and tell them to get in touch when they've finished the tutorials. Then you can help them set up their environment properly ;)
gem install rails; rails new hello_world; rails s
Then I watched the damage on localhost:3000
Rails has been fantastic. I'm a designer — I don't really have a background in programming — but rails has been incredibly accessible. It makes a lot of sense to me.
First, I had to install rvm (Rails wouldn't install with Ubuntu's Ruby packages) which took some time to figure out. Then I tried installing Rails and got some problem related to sqlite3. I then figured out that I had to install the sqlite3-ruby gem. Of course it didn't work. I found out I had to install the libsqlite3-dev package.
The whole process took a good 30-60min.
I think that if you can re-skin this and retool it for other themes/languages, you've got an excellent educational tool on your hands.
Good job!
It's neat as hell though.
But this is pretty sweet :)
I would jump on the opportunity to build labs for other languages if they offered an sdk of some sort.
As far as the labs thing goes, this feels like the future of interactive learning.
Also the went WAYYYYYYY overboard with the whole zombies thing. We get it, zombies are trendy these days, please just keep them away from anything learning based.
If you've never touched the Ruby Language before, we
recommend playing through TryRuby.org first.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I'm not trying to sound aggressive or anything, but I think that this type of issue is more related to to using some outdated or excessively complicated guides on the internet that always leave something out, in comparison being hard to get ror up and running.
- Some kind of database: easy
- Editor: easy
- Version control: easy
I guess you have never tried to build LLVM on Windows if you think that's hard ;)
Personnaly I was so sick and tired to get everyday a new problem when I wanted to install a gem that I setup a VM with Ubuntu and I launch it when I want to dev. Ubuntu is "user friendly"-ier than Windos for ONE thing setup a dev environment.
And as nobody dev on Rails under Windows it's very hard to find help or good tutorials when you encounter a bug :(
Well, apt-get is pretty sweet in general.
More to the point, while Windows Ruby dev is certainly doable (and I did it for years with comparatively no more hassle than on Ubuntu), the advantage of developing on Ubuntu is that it is far more likely to match your server environment.
It sucks big time to be cruising along and then discover that some plug-in or tool that would solve a dozen problems for you requires a C compiler and a POSIX environment.
gem install sqlite3-ruby autotest rspec
The only problem is with spork: gem install spork gave me an error. I plugged it into Google which gave me the resolution: delete rake.gemspec and gem install rake (the one click ruby installer on windows seems to come with a bad rake), then gem install spork. All of this, including installing Ruby took like 5 minutes.
- I can't get rubygems to work.
- You've used a Linux package manager to install Ruby haven't you? Don't, it's broken. Uninstall it and re-install from source.
Then follows a discussion about how the person with the problem doesn't want to do that, and the other people telling him fine, suit yourself.
The person with the problem continues to try to solve this problem some other way, but in the end either follows the previous recommendation, or stops messing with Ruby altogether.
Nowadays, Linux package managers offers the option of installing the "full" Ruby distribution, which is great, but I wonder why anyone would ever want to install the partial broken one. I don't even know if the "full" one works. :-/
I've had my problems with rails installations, but they were generally in trying to get specific rails code working- not getting a teaching instance up.
Everywhere else it's totally sane.
Nevertheless, I've found Ruby and Rails easy to install in any machine I've tried them in (A LOT), and I guess that for less Unix inclined users it might get a bit complicated along the way.
"gem install mysql" or whatever and it just works.
But the issue comes in when it doesn't work, which it didn't for me. It took hours of debugging. MAMP gets me up and running in < 5 minutes. A proper LAMP setup takes me < 10 minutes. I'm failing to see the advantage of Rails (at least from a setup standpoint) when it works perfectly most of the time, but fails so hard.