From: Dave Howell <groups.2009a@...>
Date: 2012-04-06T06:03:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Can someone throw me a bone


On Apr 4, 2012, at 17:03 , Bob Baird wrote:

> So, I am beginning with Unix (Bash tutorials) to get comfortable with 
> it.  Then, I thought ruby and last rails.  Would that be your 
> recommendation?

Ruby 1.8 is still very powerful and useful, as well as being very similar in many ways to 1.9. I would suggest you start out playing around with the command line and Ruby as is. Writing and running some Ruby programs from the command line will get you more comfortable with both. 

When you *need* to do something more than what you can do with the built-in bits, then start installing things. Installing Unix tools can be a hair-pulling nightmare, as you might have noticed. I will also heartily agree with some other people's comment that, whenever possible, use Homebrew to install stuff from the command line, instead of RPM, github, curl, Fink, or whatever else might float past. It has been so much less horrible than any of the other ways I've installed stuff. . . well, I ilke it lots. 

It's fairly likely that at some point you will need to install all or part of the XCode development system. You may well have an installer DVD that can do this; you should check the discs that came with the Mac. If not, then go to developer.apple.com, and find the link for downloading it. As mentioned, it's gigantic, so it'll probably be an overnight download.