2: Downloading and installing Ruby and Rails

I'm not going to talk about this as it is covered very well here (macs) or you can google it. You will also need some sort of text editor. I am currently using textmate (only for macs), which seems good to me. There are lots of good open source (free) text editors around. I'm afraid I can't say much more about any of them. It's good to find one that will do ruby syntax highlighting if you can. Maybe also look here. When starting out I did try aptana studio but didn't have much luck. It is more an IDE than text editor and as such seemed to want to do a lot of things for me. To be honest I didn't really give it a chance but on the whole I think it is better to go for simple text editor when you're first learning as it seems to make the procedure more transparent.