Up and Running

        Figure 1.1 A text editor/command line development environment (TextMate/iTerm).

• Terminal: On OS X, I recommend either use iTerm or the native Terminal app. On Linux, the default terminal is fine. On Windows, many users prefer to develop Rails applications in a virtual machine running Linux, in which case your command-line options reduce to the previous case. If developing within Windows itself, I recommend using the command prompt that comes with Rails Installer (Section 1.2.2). If you decide to use Sublime Text, you might want to follow the setup instructions for Rails Tutorial Tutorial will generally be of a Firefox browser. If you use Firefox, I suggest using the Firebug add-on, which lets you perform all sorts of magic, such as dynamically inspecting (and even editing) the HTML structure and CSS rules on any page. For those not using Firefox, both Safari and Chrome have a built-in ‘‘Inspect element’’ feature available by right-clicking on any part of the page.

A Note about Tools

In the process of getting your development environment up and running, you may find that you spend a lot of time getting everything just right. The learning process for editors and IDEs is particularly long; you can spend weeks on Sublime Text or Vim tutorials alone. If you’re new to this game, I want to assure you that spending time learning tools is normal. Everyone goes through it. Sometimes it is frustrating, and it’s easy to get impatient when you have an awesome web app in your head and you just want to learn Rails already, but have to spend a week learning some weird ancient Unix editor just to get started. But a craftsman has to know his tools, and in the end the reward is worth the effort. Sublime Text.9 Note: Such configuration settings are fiddly and error-prone, so this step should only be attempted by advanced users. Browsers Although there are many web browsers to choose from, the vast majority of Rails programmers use Firefox, Safari, or Chrome when developing. The screenshots in Rails