Rails Cookbook

Chapter 2. Rails Development

Introduction

Rails is geared toward making web development productive and rewarding—so productive, in fact, that it’s been claimed that you can be 10 times more productive in Rails than with other frameworks. You can be your own judge about whether you find Rails more rewarding, but when you’re more productive, you can spend more time solving the problems that are interesting to you, rather than reinventing wheels and building infrastructure. The best way to realize productivity gains is to establish a comfortable development environment. Your primary development tool will be a text editor or integrated development environment (IDE). Getting to know this tool well will allow you to navigate through your application’s source files effectively. You’ll also need tools to interact with Rails at the command line, which means selecting a suitable terminal or console application.

This chapter contains recipes that help you get your Rails development environment dialed in and create the beginnings of a Rails application. I also cover some helpful solutions to common problems associated with Rails development, like generating Ruby documentation (RDoc) for your application or developing against the most current Rails (Edge Rails).

Once you get comfortable creating and working with new Rails projects and have all of your development tools in place, you can really start exploring all that the framework has to offer.

Creating a Rails Project

Problem

You have Rails installed ...