In this tutorial we’ll cover the entire process of setting up a basic Rails environment on a clean install of Debian 7.1.

To some, the command line is a truly frightening beast. To be fair, when I began, it really was. Who in the world would ever want to sit around in a prompt when there are such beautiful visual editors out there? It seems so counterintuitive that no one should ever want to go that way.

Yet here we are. The great bearded ones hammering away in their prompts, invoking vim wizardry, emacs enigmas, and unix hackery. What makes them so cozy?

Many people come into Ruby from a C-based language background, and are quick to use only what they really feel comfortable with that has a direct parallel in their language of choice. Doing so, you miss out on all types of wonderful features of Ruby, and in this post we’ll cover a few of them.

The better programmer is not the one who flies across the keyboard, generating hundreds of lines of code, but the one who has but a few strokes that do the same work in half the effort.