For more information on coding in Rails, its many uses, and other items of interest, check out the following sites:
Visoft, Inc. Sites
def rails – The resources for Visoft’s Rails courses (this site).
Visoft, Inc. Home – The Visoft, Inc home page.
Visoft, Inc. Blogs – Various articles covering .NET, C#, Ruby, and Rails.
Developer’s Bookcase – The inspiration for the Bookcase application from the Rails 101 class. A place for developers to log all of their books.
EageReader – A clone of devbookcase.com for general book lovers.
Installs
Rails Installer – Easy installation for installing Ruby and Rails on Windows.
Ruby Installer – Ruby installation packages for Windows. If you just want Ruby without the rest of the Rails Installer package, you can get it here.
Editors and IDEs
TextMate – Fantastic editor, but only available for Macs. It utilizes TextMate bundles to add syntax highlighting, macros, and additional functionality.
e-TextEditor – Fantastic editor for Windows. Similar to TextMate on the Mac and can use TextMate Bundles (referred to as tmbundles).
Aptana Studio – An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that supports Ruby on Rails.
RubyMine – A rich IDE for Ruby and Rails development that has a similar feel to Visual Studio with ReSharper (R#) installed.
Books
Agile Web Development with Rails (4th edition) – Fantastic book that covers Rails 3, contains a tutorial, and a deep dive into the framework.
The Rails 3 Way – Great reference book covering just about everything in Rails.
Docs and More
RubyOnRails.org – The homepage for Ruby on Rails.
Rails API Documentation – All of the classes and methods found in Rails.
RubyGems.org – The majority of gems are hosted here. If you want to find out about a gem’s dependencies or more information about a gem (like it’s homepage, wiki, etc.), rubygems.org is the one stop shop.
GitHub – Repository for the majority of gems that are open-source.
LDAP and Ruby – StackOverflow post on using a gem to query Active Directory.
Railscasts – Excellent videos on a plethora of Rails topics.
RailsWizard.org – Want to create “rails new” template that includes all of the things you’ll be using in the application up-front? The RailsWizard will create a Ruby script for you that will do just that.
Ruby Toolbox – Their tagline “know your options” sums it up best. There are tons of gems out there, but which should you choose? The Ruby Toolbox ranks gems by various criteria (GitHub watchers, forks, last checkin, etc.) in different categories.
jQuery
jQuery.com – jQuery is “the” library for assisting you in writing JavaScript. It simplifies many tasks such as event handling, animation, and Ajax interactions.
jQueryUI – A library of add-ons for jQuery. It quickly adds functionality like drag and drop, calendar controls, effects, etc.
jQuery Mobile – Touch-optimized web framework for smartphones and tablets.
jQuery Tools – Contains fantastic controls that add-on to the base jQuery library. Be sure to check out the various demos. You can either download the scripts or have them hosted for you on a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
Google’s CDN – Google hosts many JavaScript frameworks (including jQuery, jQueryUI, Prototype, etc) on their CDN.
Hosting Rails
Heroku – One of the easiest ways to deploy and host a Rails application.
Phusion Passenger – Also known as mod_rails, it is a server capable of running Rails applications on top of Apache or nginx. You can also run Passenger in standalone mode.
HTML5 Examples
Basecamp Mobile – A mobile version of 37signals’ BaseCamp application. Be sure to also read the initial announcement where the question “why a web app and not a native app?” is answered.
The Financial Times App – An HTML5 mobile application targeted at iOS devices like the iPhone or iPad.
Installation