Today InfoQ published a sample chapter from Rails for .NET Developers, a book written by Jeff Cohen and Brian Eng. The goal of the book is to help guide .NET developers to take advantage of Ruby on Rails.
InfoQ’s Robert Bazinet had the opportunity to speak with both Brian and Jeff about their experience moving from .NET to Rails, writing their blog about the topic and of course their motivation for writing the book.
Taken from the interview:
Robert Bazinet : Why should .NET developers be interested in Ruby on Rails?
Brian Eng : I was learning Rails and using it for side-projects while working at my 9-to-5 .NET job for almost 2 years. I was shocked at how much of an immediate impact it had on how I thought about my .NET code. It definitely made me a better developer, and that in itself is reason enough to learn Ruby. Plus, as techies, we're easily distracted by new, shiny things.
Readers can download the sample chapter or read the interview, Book Excerpt and Interview: Rails for .NET Developers, in its entirety.
Community comments
The Best Environment for Rails on Windows
by Charles Roper,
The Best Environment for Rails on Windows
by Charles Roper,
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There is a mild implication in this article that you should be using either a Mac or a Linux machine to develop Rails apps but this just isn't necessary. You can develop Rails apps just fine on Windows (no need for VS!), especially if you setup a local Linux VM (I recommend VirtualBox with either Linux Mint or Ubuntu) to use as a local test server. I find this to be a very satisfactory setup and very easy to work with, especially if you follow some of the tutorials found on Slicehost.
There's a fantastic post over on Akita on Rails titled The Best Environment for Rails on Windows. It's a really good tutorial on how to setup a robust working environment for Rails on Windows. Akita suggests gVim as the editor to use for Rails development, but I'd recommend E Text Editor which is compatible with Textmate, the editor of choice for Rails developers on the Mac.