Summary: Welcome to the first screencast in the Learning Rails free online course in Ruby on Rails. <p><strong>Note:</strong> we created this series in 2008, and the Ruby on Rails world, along with the software that supports it (such as various gems) has evolved quite a bit since then. Check the comments for suggestions on how to overcome various incompatibilities. We hope to have an updated version of the series by the end of 2010.</p> <p>If you want to follow along on your own system, you’ll need to have a basic Ruby on Rails development environment set up. Check <a href="/podcasts/79333-setting-up-your-development-environment/">Lesson 8</a> for details on how to do that.</p> <p>We’d love to hear any feedback you may have on this screencast. Please add your comment at the bottom of the page.</p> <p>In this lesson, we build a very simple Ruby on Rails application, with just a few static pages, so we can walk through the files that make up a Rails application and show how the view system works.</p> <p>The simple approach we’ve taken here isn’t something we would recommend for a production Rails application; it’s designed to cut away as much complexity as possible so we can focus on the essentials. In the next lesson, we’ll start building a more dynamic site.</p> <p>There’s not a lot of code in this first lesson, and we’ll be replacing it in the next lesson, but you can <a href="/learningrails_9.zip">download the full application</a> if you’d like.</p> <p>P.S. We’re still refining our production workflow, and the video in lesson is not quite up to our production quality goal. You’ll see improvements in future lessons.</p>
