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I'd love to have one of these for Ruby. Every time I want to try out something written in Ruby I run head-first in to the packaging problem - Debian and Ubuntu don't appear to like shipping a working gem (presumably because it conflicts with how apt likes to do things) and the documentation on how to resolve the resulting inscrutable error messages isn't particularly easy to find. The Mac is a bit better, but I still run in to problems far too often.

I'm pretty sure a "Ruby Ecosystem, An Introduction" guide is exactly what I need.



I'm sitting in lecture right now, so here's a short version:

- Use http://beginrescueend.com/ to install ruby itself

- Use http://gembundler.com/ to manage project-level dependencies

Both of those sites have good examples, but if no one steps up I might just write something like the linked guide when time frees up.


I followed this while learning best practices for Ruby:

http://ascarter.net/2011/09/25/modern-ruby-development.html

It seemed to cover everything that I wanted, coming from a familiar Python background of pip/virtualenv/etc. For reference here's the associated HN commentary:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3044908


Up-vote, because it's a great idea for any language/tool out there. I happen to know ruby, but taking the first steps in anything is difficult, and usually involves looking up a lot of the things you already know from a more familiar place (setting up, using libs, etc). I'd really love to see a community resource like this - perhaps I'll start working on one :)


The gem issue is actually fixed in Debian testing. Not sure when it'll arrive in Ubuntu, but it can't be soon enough.


The way these things get written is by keeping notes as you figure out the bits and pieces ...


You got it spot on. Note keeping the the way to go.

The post was extracted from our internal wiki, the content in which has evolved over past 2 years and spread all over.

It took me about 20-25 hours, spread over 3 weeks, to put it in the shape of a single post/tutorial.




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