Rails for Zombies - Learn Rails from the comfort of your browser (opens in new tab)

You had a good experience. Lots of people don't. Getting the environment set up took me hours, and I'm a programmer. First I installed Ruby with my distro's package manager. Then I followed the instructions in the book and installed gem from the RubyGems website. Uhoh, not supposed to do that anymore, Ruby comes with a different version of gem. The new Rails website tells me I need a different version of Ruby, the one my distro installed doesn't work with Rails 3. Remove Ruby, try to remove the rubygems-I-shouldn't-install-myself, start over. Install the latest Ruby, then rails from the gem. Try to install some gems I will need, they won't compile. Ruby was compiled without support for some library. Go find, compile and install that library, then recompile Ruby with that feature (after researching how to compile specific libraries into it), and retry installing the gem. OK, on to the next gem, which needs another missing library. How did Ruby even compile if all these necessary libraries weren't there? Continue like this for hours until I finally have Rails and the few gems I'll need working and can see the default page on a web server.

Simply following your two step instructions on any of my servers would not create a working RoR setup.

I've helped a number of people "get started with Rails" over the years, and I've had to help every single one of them get their environment set up properly.

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 ;)

Exactly what I was thinking. I'm barely starting with rails. On Mac all I did was:

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.

I just installed RoR on a clean Ubuntu install and it wasn't easy at all.

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 guess you never really tried to install a full dev environment for Rails on Windows...

at least the chunky bacon vibe was original and creative. Now there's fucking zombies everywhere.

It was their original product, yes.

Correct. herokugarden.com redircts to heroku.com now.