After watching Michael Buffington’s presentation of Ruby On Rails, I decided it was time to start learning. I had quite a few obstacles in getting everything up and running. There are three key components - Following a tutorial, getting YourSQL, and following a tutorial.

I was able to create a simple cookbook app in very short order. If I ignore all of the technical hang-ups I had due to my lack of attention to detail, then it would have been 5X as fast. Here is a brief overview of my system:

2.0 Ghz iMac Intel Core-Duo
2 gigs of Ram
OSX 10.4.7
Previous local webserver/apache/mysql experience: Many failed attempts
Recovering PC addict - 5 months

The first step in getting ROR running on your computer is to go here and follow this excellent tutorial. I found that if I paid very close attention to the details, the whole process went fairly smoothly.

At the time of this post, there is no Universal Binary version of YourSQL, this kind fellow, has recompiled it to be Universal. Drop it in your applications folder, you will be using it soon. (I spent many hours trying to install phpMyAdmin, this added significant time to the tutorial for me)

Curt Hibbs has posted this quick ROR tutorial for creating a Cookbook. One thing to note, he is using MySQL Front or SQLFront. YourSQL does the trick and to top it off it’s free. If you don’t get the Universal Binary for YourSQL, this will not work. Curt’s tutorial is fairly straightforward, here were my hangups.

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Page 1 - Had a hard time installing SQLFront. I researched and found YourSQL, it’s very pretty and “just worked”
Page 2 - The final step on this page. If you make changes to your ROR configuration, specifically database.yml, the server needs to be restarted. Now if I had done this tutorial in one day, I would have remembered that the webserver needs to be restarted in Terminal using Ruby commands. Details!
Page 3 - All of the database creating within YourSQL is a different from SQLFront. If you have gotten this far, you should be able to figure it out.
Page 4 - No Hang-ups (that weren’t related to not reading between the lines)
Page 5 - ” ”

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All in all, this was a good first step in my quest for Ruby On Rails wisdom. I don’t think I am quite yet ready to write applications, but I will get there soon enough. I have tried doing things in php similar to the cookbook, and it did take me far longer. So the rapid development of ROR is really great. I am looking forward to more.

** Update - I just did his follow-up tutorial, and it is good. Cookbook Part II

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