[archildress]

Love this tutorial. Michael is one of the best teachers I've encountered. It's such a great tutorial that I hesitate to ask, but I'm not the biggest fan of the Cloud9 IDE stuff that was added in the later versions, though. Anyone else?

[houli]

The whole "setup your environment" phase is tricky for someone new especially if you're on Windows and probably caused a lot of people to stop reading before they even touched a line of Ruby code.

[hbhakhra]

I'm an experienced dev and I've abandoned many weekend projects because setup was way too complicated. I'm currently working through the tutorial to learn RoR and I did skip the cloud9 setup and use CLI, but I wouldn't recommended it for beginners because for them its important to get quick wins before running into problems.

[205guy]

For someone new, I agree the setup is daunting. It was almost comical that "hello world" took 10 pages.

I think the tutorial could really use an explanation of what a web app is (a bunch of files in a particular structure that the special server knows how to handle) and why we need all the setup to handle it. Then it should explain what actions, controllers, and routes are and what they do, instead of just introducing the terms without meanings. It wasn't until the exercises suggested changing the route to a different action that it clicked for me.

BTW, I think that "goodbye world" is a horrible example to use.

[brianwawok]

Sadly I think this is true for any environment. Java is a mess. Python is a mess. .Net is a mess.

Way too hard to really get going, but maybe it's an OK patience screener.