Welcome to the Treehouse Community
Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.
Looking to learn something new?
Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.
Start your free trial
Andrew Stelmach
12,583 PointsDo I need to buy a MAC to learn how to build Ruby web apps? (To a fairly high standard)
Please say no...
5 Answers
Brandon Barrette
20,485 PointsYou can develop with Ruby on Rails or any programming languages on a Windows machine, it is just a little more difficult. To see why, I suggest watching this video:
The main reason is OSX is a POSIX environment like Linux operating systems. This video explains it really well.
Stone Preston
42,016 Pointsyou can do it on a PC. But it seems the Ruby/Rails community prefers an Mac development environment from what I have experienced
Christopher Bijalba
12,446 PointsIt helps a lot, but you can take the edge off of learning on a different platform by either setting up an actual web server where your ruby app would be deployed, or leasing one. That is the most realistic environment possible.
There are online spaces available for testing, as well.
Andrew Stelmach
12,583 PointsHow much does it cost to lease one?
Christopher Bijalba
12,446 PointsA couple of dollars a month, generally. I believe there are also places that let you pay based on usage rather than a flat cost. You could also find more expensive solutions that have fancy interfaces or control panels that allow you to install packages/addons with a few clicks, rather than doing it manually.
Beware though that sometimes the leased solutions limit what you're allowed to do. this can be a good thing if you're not sure about certain configurations or a bad thing if you want more access than you're getting.
Andrew Stelmach
12,583 PointsAnd would setting up a server on your windows laptop be as good?
Christopher Bijalba
12,446 PointsFor local testing, yes, you could set up a server on your laptop and connect to it locally. You could look into software packages such as wamp to get an apache server setup, then find instructions on how to install ruby or rails on it.
That is a very broad question, however. You could get it set up so that it works, but you'd also be responsible for running the server, optimization, updates, and of course security!
Andrew Stelmach
12,583 PointsWhich is the easiest in the long-run, Chris? The leased server?
Christopher Bijalba
12,446 PointsI think in the context of trying to learn as much as you can about how it all works, they're similar enough that it doesn't matter which but different enough that you learn different things from them.
If you run it locally, you've got a bit more to learn about how to get the server up and running, installing, updating and then myriad configuration options.
If you lease, you don't have to worry about that stuff but you might find yourself limited or missing specific configurations that you need.
That said, most of the time leased is easier to the point that you just deploy your apps and test on them without the need for as much configuration, if any.
For learning purposes, you could try google's app engine for free and finding a tutorial for how to get ruby going on it. It may be more extensive. There may be other free hosting solutions for small scale / tutorial purposes.
Also, if you end up setting up a server on your laptop, you could then use that to learn/deploy other server side languages.