Ruby, Rails development environment on Windows 8.1

Question

I am working with a friend to develop a website using Ruby and Rails. I am an absolute beginner. I am looking to setup my development environment and install everything I need before looking at book and tutorials on Ruby and Rails.

I have Windows 8.1. I have read that this is a nightmare for what I want to do. I have read suggestions about setting up a virtual environment with Linux. To be honest all I know about Linux is that its a different operating system from Windows.

I am continuing my search but thought I would post here in case someone can give me suggestions. I have read many of the other related posts but they either did not answer my question or there weren't many responses to them. Suggestions I have seen include Virtualbox, VMWare, and Vagrant. Do I need just one of these to get started? I probably need to learn a bunch about Linux first, but I'm not sure where to begin since I don't have a clue about Linux. Thanks.

Answer 1

I will share with you my personal experience.

I started with Ruby on Rails back in 2008, at that time I did know very little about Linux. And of course Vagrant didn't exist at that time.

I started by setting up a really simple, but working development environment, which consisted of latest Ruby that was running in Windows XP (OS I was using at that time), and Rubygems.

That setup enabled me to learn as much as I could about Ruby on Rails and develop first applications. After that I felt like Windows was a bottleneck for me, and I wanted to learn more about Linux. That was the time I switched to Ubuntu (and then to OS X). Then as I progressed in my professional development, I started working with Vagrant for my projects, which is another story.

TL;DR

If you don't know a single thing about Linux and unix-like systems, just have fun with Rails and ignore VMs/Vagrant/etc setups, as it will suck up your time with various issues or settings, so you'd better focus on getting up to speed with Rails :)