Ruby Documentation, Editors, Platform, and Blogs

I've been working on my first Ruby on Rails project, and I feel like a complete n00b. It's a completely different paradigm from Java. A very big difference between Java and Ruby is that Java is documented very well in comparison to Ruby. There are swaths beginner tutorials available on the web. And many screencasts. But good documentation is difficult to find. Or when it is available (gotapi.com), it doesn't say exactly what I'm looking for.

Haha - I expressed this frustration to a fellow member of nycruby, asking him where he goes for documentation. He said that Ruby changes so much and so fast that he reads blogs to learn things. Yeesh! He was generous enough to share a list of blogs with me.

Aside from being a pedagogical tool, good documentation provides an all-in-one easy bookmark of all the things I've learned. Since that doesn't exist, I'm going to try to blog the things that I learn about Ruby in this blog as an aide to myself, and hopefully a few others.


editors
Here's a few things off the top of my head. I invested the 39 euros for TextMate. That's a steep price for a text-editor, but everyone seems to use it and love it. It's pretty much all I've been using, so I like it, too. My previous development-tools-of-choice were Emacs and make. I like development tools that don't do too much for you, and TextMate fits this bill perfectly, while providing many pre-built macros for a plethora of languages.

platform
In order to follow the Ruby crowd further, I've stopped using the Dell laptop they gave me at work for development, and started bringing in my PowerBook G4 nowadays. I can't stand developing Ruby on a Windows machine anymore.

SQLite3-ruby vs SQLite
Here's one thing that I learned today after much stressful googling (I really stress too much when I develop): sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby is the command to install the SQLite3 bridge on Mac OS X. SQLite3 comes with Mac OS 10.4, so I did not understand what the problem was.

blogs
Oh, here's the list of Ruby blogs that Allen gave me.

http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/
http://eigenclass.org//hiki.rb
http://www.loudthinking.com/
http://jroller.com/page/obie
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/
http://pragdave.pragprog.com/pragdave/
https://railsexpress.de/blog
http://redhanded.hobix.com/
http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/
http://www.robbyonrails.com/