Browsing Slashdot this morning, I came across a really cool two part tutorial on Ruby on Rails written by Curt Hibbs.

Ruby on Rails is a web application framework for the Ruby programming language.

I’ve read the first half of the two part tutorial and have to say this looks pretty cool. I attended a one day workshop on the Ruby programming language a couple of years ago led by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (of Pragmatic Programmer fame) and while I really liked the language, I felt that at the time it was a little too immature to use as compared to a PERL or Python.

I have to say though, after reading the first half of this tutorial, I’m seriously considering looking at Ruby again. You really can get a load of work done in a short time with the language and frameworks like this will really help give a developer that feeling of “immediate gratification” that we all love to feel. I also noticed that Ruby now has a package manager as well called RubyGems. I’ll have to grab that as well.

Here are some quick links to the two parts of the tutorial:

• Rolling with Ruby on Rails Part 1
• Rolling with Ruby on Rails Part 2

When it comes to general programming, I would pick a good scripting language over something like C or Java any day. I’m a huge Python fan, but only because I didn’t see Ruby as something that was mature enough at the time I looked at it to really warrant my attention, no matter how quickly I could get things done. That seems to be changing. I’ll have to keep a better watch over the Ruby community this year. The language seems have some people building a few really good tools around it.