Fear of Fish

I've noticed a lot of people asking questions about ajax, rjs, scriptaculous and other whizzy cool effects lately. So I thought I'd document a couple here so there's less confusion about some of the simpler effects. I've included an element toggle on a hyper link, a simple div that updates with data from an action using link_to_remote, and others. Enjoy.

You'll learn effects like these: Video of ajax effects

It's time I told you a little about http://getmestarted.net/, a little project I intend to finish off as soon as a project that New Bamboo and I are working on that we think you'll all be very happy with. Get me started is going to be a site that helps those beginning programming languages, it helps you get installed, then runs you though your first little app, and then gently nudges you in the right direction for learning more by providing articles, links, and suggestions that might help.

Update: Digg this to help others find it The entire book will be released under the same license: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License, meaning you can read the whole book for free, or add to the book. A subversion repository will be set up for contributions to be added to, and a notes section for collaborative discussions on the direction of certain chapters. Of course there will be an outline of the chapters that the book will fill and a writing style/guide.

As a taster, here's the bit I ripped out of my book to get you going with Ruby on Rails, it will get Ruby on Rails running on your system, and then run you through your first application. I've provided it as a pdf for now:

Download Getting Started with Ruby on Rails

Right click and save the file. In some cases you might get a .txt extension appended on the end, just remove it as the file is a pdf. Thanks.

Part 2 of my beginner series focuses on the generator, and models. Many a question has been asked about these bits and bobs because it's alien to those coming from php, java and the like. Hopefully I can clear it up a little bit.

In the spirit of the rails community, I'm beginning a short tutorial series on the overview of Ruby on Rails, how it works and where to get started. In Part 1 we're going to look at how it all knits together into a web application. We'll talk about which bits do what, and what to use them for.