A few days ago I finally succumbed to the powers of my inner nerd. The release of StarTrek Online was too much for my LCARS loving brain to handle, so I caved. I bought the game online, booted into windows on my mac and started downloading the 8 gig installer and was ready to go...so I thought.

Warning: This is currently out of date as it was based on an older version of MongoMapper.

I have had a few requests for tips on getting started with MongoDB and Rails so I thought I would drop some quick knowledge. It is actually really easy to get going, but Rails always does everything for you so when something comes along that doesn’t, you sometimes feel lost.

Ruby is commonly associated with the frameworks (Rails, RSpec, and many others) that it enabled, but it is much more than that. The same ideology and design principles that popularized the language at the start are also the reason why it is being currently ported to a variety of alternative platforms: JVM, Objective-C, Smalltalk VM and Microsoft’s DLR.

Git is a distributed software configuration management tool that has been adopted by the majority of the Ruby on Rails community. In many cases, Git is required for plugin installation.

Installing Git

See instructions on how to install Git for your platform.

There are obviously many reasons why Git is awesome (and why it sucks too), and there comes a point where it helps to dispel some of the rumors and issues surrounding Git. The following list attempts to show what Git is not. If you have your own reasons, feel free to contribute them to the comments and they may be added in.