Ruby on Rails--initial impressions

I discovered that Ruby on Rails (heretofore called "RoR") has a huge number of dependencies and actually making sure they are all installed is a real pain. The installation instructions vary by operating system, so you have to make sure you find one specific to your OS (in my case, Mac OS X). I made the mistake of installing Rails before installing RVM (Ruby Version Manager), which made it nearly impossible for me to check that all the dependencies were found. So, once I installed RVM, I then had to reinstall Rails. At this point, it still wouldn't work, so I did some googling and realized I needed to run "bundle install". Finally, success!

Pleased that I'd gotten the install to cooperate, I set about creating a new project and downloaded Aptana Studio 3 to use as my terminal/text editor for the RoR project. I had used Aptana for Javascript before and had found it fairly easy to work with so I figured I'd use it for this project as well.

In terms of learning RoR, I've been following a basic blog creation tutorial from the RoR API site and have gotten about half-way through it so far. I've also been doing the Rails for Zombies tutorials, which teach you the basics of Rails apps. I've found that RoR is quite a change from what I'm used to, which is mainly Java with some Javascript and HTML experience. I am finding the most difficult part is keeping track of where everything goes and how it is all connected (RoR projects have an insanely large number of folders). I find that I'll kind of have an idea of what I want to do, but then I'll get absolutely lost trying to implement it because I keep forgetting that I have to connect all these files in various folders (and on top of that, the syntax is fairly different from, say, Java, so I keep having to look it up). I'm hoping that I'll have a better feeling for this in a week or so since tutorials can only help you go so far. Eventually, you just have to start your own project and figure it out as you go.