I started playing around with Ruby back in the fall to see what all the hype was about and learn a bit about a language that is not by Microsoft, not because I wanted to stay clear of Microsoft but to try something different. As I mentioned before my career has been with mainly Microsoft products.
I picked up a copy of Programming Ruby from the Pragmatic Programmers. This book seems to be the standard text on the subject. I also downloaded the most recent build of Ruby from http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/. I am currently running my tests on Windows an there is an installer for Ruby from Ruby-winms32. Using the installer from Ruby-winms32 really makes the setup of Ruby on Windows very easy.
I am very used to the developer experience in Visual Studio.NET 2003/2005 and I am spoiled by it. As I started to look at Ruby I knew I needed to also look at an environment to use to hopefully allow me to write Ruby code as well as do some of the things I am used to like integrated debugging and visual design of web pages. I did a Google search and found that Eclipse has an add-in called RDT – Ruby Development Tools which seems to do most of what I am looking for, most importantly the debugging aspect. I will try it out and report my findings.
For now I am writing Ruby code in Notepad2, which thanks to Scott Hanselman, has Ruby syntax highlighting.
I also found a nice Ruby tutorial and the ability to try Ruby online without installing Ruby. This is great even to just to play around.
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