Getting Started

Welcome aboard! This introductory path is for OTW Coders, and will get you up to speed with the set of tools and systems that we use. If you have any questions or any of it doesn't work, contact Volunteers & Recruiting to get access to our chat room, and someone can help out.

This is part of the Getting Started tutorial for Ruby on Rails Coders.

(This is a copy of the tutorial available on our internal wiki - that version is more likely to be up to date. Contact Volunteers & Recruiting for access.)

Index:

1. Getting Started
2. Software Overview For Coders 3a. Setting Up Your Webdev - Mac OS X 3b. Setting Up Your Webdev - Windows 3c. Setting Up Your Webdev - Linux
3. Testing Your Rails Setup
4. Getting Started With Google Code and Git
5. Coding Practice: otwtraining Project
6. AO3 on Github
7. Google Code: an Introduction
8. Test Driven Development
9. Work On An OTW Project

Overview:

You should follow the steps of this tutorial in order, since some of the later bits depend on the earlier stuff! We've done our best to break it down and no one piece should be too hard, but there's a bunch of (free!) software to install, so get yourself a drink and a snack, and don't be even a little shy about asking for help! First of all, we also highly recommend the tutorials at Rails for Zombies - they introduce the main concepts of Rails. If you do those first, it will give you a head-start in actual coding, and give you a feel for if you like it or not. Then come back and carry on with this tutorial, or let us know if you'd rather help out with a different area of the OTW. They recommend TryRuby.org, which is in theory a great tutorial, but frequently breaks - let us know if you have problems. If you have trouble reading the default font on TryRuby, we have a Stylish script you can install to improve it. If you want some more tutorials in different learning styles, "Getting to Grips With Ruby and Rails" on our internal wiki has links.