Covered in this episode:

• How to get help
• Google
• Ruby’s Documentation
• Forums/Mailing Lists
• Blogs on Ruby
• Text Editors
• Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

Links:

Ruby-Lang: http://www.ruby-lang.org
Ruby-Doc:  http://www.ruby-doc.org/

Forums:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/
http://www.rubyforums.com/

Text Editors:
Notepad++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
SciTE http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
jEdit http://www.jedit.org/
Text Mate http://macromates.com/

IDEs
Netbeans http://www.netbeans.org/
Aptana Rad Rails http://www.aptana.com/
FreeRIDE http://rubyforge.org/projects/freeride/
Geany http://www.geany.org/
More… http://rubyforge.org/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=65

Transcript

Hello Everybody! And Welcome to Programming with Ruby Episode 3, Getting Help
and Tools. I’m your presenter, Tyler. This video is brought to you by
manwithcode.com

Covered in this Episode.
I’ll be going over how to get help.
If you ever get stuck while using Ruby you’re first stop should be Google,
to some this may sound obvious, but some people still don’t use Google.
Your next stop would be Ruby’s Documentation.
Then I will be showing you forums and mailing lists where you can ask for help
or help others.
Also I will be showing you some blogs by Ruby Developers.

On the tools side, I will be showing you some good Text Editors, and a few
IDEs (or Integrated Development Environments).

Just as a side note, I will be showing many websites today, but don’t worry,
all links are in the description

Lets Get Started!

Out first stop will be Google. Lets say I wanted to learn about Ruby Lambdas
just type in “ruby lamdas” and you get a list of relavant web pages. I’ll
pick the first link, and here is some information on how to use lambdas.

If Google can’t help you, lets look at the official Ruby Documentation.
This is ruby-doc.org. It has some articles and tutorials on Ruby. But what
we are interested in is the part that says “Core API” we are using the
1.8 version of Ruby, so we will visit the 1.8.6 core link
and here is the documentation for Ruby! lets say I wanted to look for lambdas
again, I’ll hit CTRL-F for the browsers find funtion, and type in “lambda” and
here is the information I want, I’ll click the link, and there is the
documentation!

Okay lets say that a Google search and a look through the documentation doesn’t
help you with your problem. What do you do? You ask a person, of course! This
is where the forums come in.

There are two forums that I like, there is ruby-forum.com
And rubyforums.com
both of which you can post on and will hopefully get answers

For general tips and news about Ruby, you may be interested in some blogs about
Ruby. To find some, lets go to ruby-lang.org
click on the community link.
scroll down, and click the “weblogs about ruby” link
and here there are some blogs, and aggregators listed

So hopefully if you have a problem all these resources should be able to help
you. Now we are going to move onto tools. First stop Text Editors.

There are a few good text editors available, so I will just highlight a few.
If any of these look interesting, remember that all links are in the description.
First is Windows only text editor notepad++, the editor I use on Windows
Then is SciTE, a scintilla based editor
Jedit is a popular text editor that is written in Java
Text mate is a very popular text editor for the Macintosh that costs $55
For Linux there are editors like gEdit and Kate which have some of the features
of the editors mentioned above.

Even if you like your featureless plain text editor like notepad, features the
previously mentioned editors have make writing code much easier, and I recommend
you get one.

First we have netbeans, which is my IDE of choice. Even though it was originally
for Java, it works very well with Ruby
Next is Aptana rad rails, an IDE which many people like, but was too buggy on my
computer, it is especially useful if you are using Ruby on Rails
freeRIDE is a popular editor for ruby
Geany is a GTK based editor for Linux that works with many different languages

These are all very good editors, but because you are currently learning I would
just recommend a text editor for now, when you start developing larger projects
an IDE can be very useful.

This brings us to the end of this episode, I hope it helped you.
If you need any help, have questions or comments, leave a comment below or
contact me at tyler@manwithcode.com

Hey! before you go, you may have realized that I am making these videos for free
if they have helped you at all please donate. If you viewing this on Youtube there is a
donation link to the right in the description box. If you are on my site there is
a donation button to the right

Thanks for watching! Bye!