One of the things that really made me drool over Rails to start with was its use of ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord is a really spifftastic tool that allows you to describe your database and its data (together known as your database model) in Ruby code, and instead of having to write the same kinds of stupid repetitive queries ("select name,category_id from articles where id=5") over and over, allows you to access your data in a representative way, right there in the code

ImageScience is a clean and happy Ruby library that generates
thumbnails -- and kicks the living crap out of RMagick. Oh, and it
doesn't leak memory like a sieve. :) For more information including build steps, see http://seattlerb.rubyforge.org/

Because this course is designed for beginning programmers, I am going to take it slow and easy for the first few lessons.  My discussion will be informal, and will be designed to get you familiar and comfortable with the Python interactive programming environment.  Later on, I will get a little more formal.

Ruby was introduced by Yukihiro Matsumoto (known widely as “Matz”) in 1994 and was officially released by Matz in 1995.

Rails framework was designed and given by David Heinemeier Hansson in 1994. It was developed under the MIT License system and thus made Ruby on rails an open source and free to be implemented by everyone.

This is again an important reason as to why Ruby on Rails has acquired a significant position in programming.

If you're using an account on a hosted server, your ISP may have already installed Python. Most popular Linux distributions come with Python in the default installation. Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes a command-line version of Python, although you'll probably want to install a version that includes a more Mac-like graphical interface.