In Rolling with Ruby on Rails, I barely scratched the surface of what you can do with Ruby on Rails. I didn't talk about data validation or database transactions, and I did not mention callbacks, unit testing, or caching. There was hardly a mention of the many helpers that Rails includes to make your life easier. I can't really do justice to all of these topics in the space of this article, but I will go into details on some of them and present a brief overview of the rest, with links to ...

Setting up a local Rails development environment is simple in Mac OS X Tiger. Because of its Unix underpinnings, a lot of the core functionality is already built in. For example, Ruby, Apache web server and SQLite are preinstalled with every Mac. Even with this free functionality, there are a few things we are going to need to install: namely RubyGems and the Rails framework itself....

why's (poignant) guide to Ruby is unlike any other guide to programming you have ever read. It features talking foxes, bizzare sidebars, and more crazy humor than most people can handle without loud chuckles.

It should come as no surprise that Mac OS X is a favored platform for Rails development. Rails and its supporting cast of web servers and databases thrive on the rich Mac OS X environment. A popular text editor used by many Rails programmers is TextMate, a Cocoa application. And all members of the Rails core development team work with Macs.

This article introduces you to Ruby on Rails by building a trivial web application step by step. Consider it a ride on the express train&md ...

You live on the bleeding edge. You like to live dangerously.

You have everything working right with Rails 0.14.1. But some bugs that were fixed or features that were added mean that your app won’t work with 0.13.1 anymore.

Plus, you are on a shared host who is still using the ancient 0.13.1. You want to upgrade to the latest release candidate of Rails. How do you do it?

There are several ways, but here’s how I did it....

Curt Hibbs has written Rolling with Ruby on Rails, a tutorial on Ruby on Rails for O'Reilly OnLAMP. (Amusing fact: LAMP is an acronym for the triumvirate+1 of Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. I am perfectly willing to admit that I am, in fact, easily amused, but I think that this is kinda funny.)

It's a good tutorial. Good as it is, though, it's not perfect (hell, what is?). But hooray for imperfection, because it spurred me to write.
The Review

It's actually a ...

Maybe you've heard about Ruby on Rails, the super productive new way to develop web applications, and you'd like to give it a try, but you don't know anything about Ruby or Rails. This article steps through the development of a web application using Rails. It won't teach you how to program in Ruby, but if you already know another object-oriented programming language, you should have no problem following along (and at the end you can find links on learning Ruby).

Using Ajax on Rails

This is for designers who are going to be working with Rails and is intended to give them a good starting point to jump into work with a Rails developer. This is all introductory material. As such, I cover some basics (MVC, locations of files) and move from there to a code example and more advanced topics (partials, ActionView helpers)...