Part 1: Installation

Just to infuriate some people, these instructions are for a) people as thick as myself, b) windows users. Who said Ruby was elitist?

a) Download the one click installer and run it. I suggest installing it somewhere easy to find (i.e. c:/ruby).

b) Fire up DOS! If you're used to a fancy visual environment, then this might be a shock (it certainly was for me) - you can do it by clicking start, then run, then entering "cmd" and pressing enter. (I said this was a guide for beginners, didn't I?)

c) The one click installation included a very clever set of scripts called Gems, which basically allows you to manage add-ons for ruby through one unified program. We need to make sure the actual Gems script is upto date, which we do by typing:

gem install rubygems_update

and then:

update_rubygems

This updates it to the latest version (at time of writing, 0.8.8) so the next step goes without a hitch.

c) We'll now install the Rails framework, by entering:

gem install rails

Press Y to agree to everything and the installation should complete without a hitch.

Well done, you've now installed ruby and the rails framework!