O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com has posted a new article by Curt Hibbs about Ruby on Rails. An especially nice touch was that Curt decided to use Windows as the operating system for this installation. Since most of the existing Rails documentation focuses on its installation and configuration on Unix or Mac OS X, it can sometimes be difficult to find Windows-centric documentation for Rails.

The article is a tutorial that covers both the installation and setup of Rails, as well as how to develop a sample application. Curt’s very thorough in his discussion and does something that I wish a lot more tutorial writers would do when they’re introducing a new technology like this: he intentionally makes a few mistakes along the way. The kinds of mistakes that you or I would probably make too. Of course, he explains what’s going on and how to correct those mistakes, but Curt’s approach provides a lot more insight into the proper use of Rails than would the typical approach, where everything goes right the first time. By the end of the tutorial you have a reasonably functional “Cookbook” web application, backed by a MySQL database. Curt also promises a follow-up article to discuss adding additional functionality to the application.

Some of the discussion on ruby-talk indicates that the article may be a little out of date — not surprising, since the development on Rails has been going at fever pitch over the last few months. Nevertheless, this is a valuable resource for beginning Rails developers.