In the near future, I may be teaching a Ruby programming class to undergraduates at an art college. It’s a safe assumption that the students have little to no experience with programming. The class will be taught in a computer lab, but they don’t have any administrative rights on the lab computers.
Ideally, I’d like the students to be able to run Ruby from a flash drive both in the lab and on their computers at home. Even better is if it could be done relatively transparently on both a Mac and a Windows computer (I assume Linux users probably know how to set up Ruby anyway). And even better is if they could run Ruby on Rails and/or install gems using the Ruby installation on the Flash drive.
Is this entirely unrealistic or is there a straightforward way to do this? These will be non-programmer, art students, so the less setup on their end, the better.
Edit:
I should have mentioned that I’m aware of a few different one click installers for Ruby and Rails. I guess I’m wondering if there’s a way that I can have give the students an already configured install that runs off of a flash drive and allows them to run Ruby scripts and maybe even install gems.
To start, you will need two copies of Ruby on your USB drive: one for Windows and one for Mac OS X.
You will then need to create a script in each to add Ruby to the path and open a terminal.
I would structure it like this:
Windows
Content of
start.batCreate a shortcut to
start.batwith the working directory beingruby/windowsMac OS X
Content of
start.sh(Not sure of equivalent script file)Then create a shortcut to execute the script.
Now, instead of starting a terminal up normally, use the shortcuts and Ruby will run from the USB drive.