As you might have guessed from my last post, I’ve finally gotten my ass in gear and am trying to learn Ruby on Rails. It’s a little rough trying to do this on Windows; it really seems like most of the serious Ruby developers are on Mac OS X. I’d prefer to be on Mac OS X but the only Mac I currently own is an old Powerbook G4 running OS X 10.3. Anyway, Windows will have to do. Netbeans actually seems to be a decent IDE for Ruby on Rails development.
I bought the Agile Web Development with Rails (Second Edition) book a couple of years ago; unfortunately, it’s based on Rails 1.x. There seems to have been a lot of changes in Rails 2.x. Scaffolding is one of the changes that beginners will run into immediately if they’re using an old book/tutorial, which this guy blogs about here:
http://davidlynch.org/blog/2008/01/rails-20-scaffolding/
This blog post is a pretty good rundown of the new features of Rails 2.x:
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done
My first “hello world” type app is going to be a simple personal library management application. Building basic CRUD functionality should be pretty straight forward, but I’m going to work on adding a feature where the user can just type in the ISBN or ASIN (Amazon.com unique product identifier), which will connect to the Amazon Associates Web Service to get other details such as author, description, publication date, etc. and fill it in automatically.
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