Mike Clark just started what will hopefully become an easy to follow series of blog entries for learning Ruby. Thanks to Mike, I finally got around to installing RDT and for the first time, see the green bar in Ruby (so far, I had only used the command line while reading the book) and boy did that give me an unrealistic sense of achievement :)

Mike, please keep going!

While looking for the Eclipse plug-in for Ruby at eclipse-plugins.info, I also checked the homepages of the PyDev and PHPEclipse plugins. I'd go as far as saying that if you're still using a fancy notepad for developing in some scripting language, you might benefit from a quick looksee to what an IDE platform such as Eclipse has to offer.

Dion also reacted to Mike's blog entry by discussing his own learning tools for getting up to speed with a new programming language, namely automated tests and an interactive shell. I think the list is missing something vastly important -- code completion. I want to get up to speed as quickly as possible and I just don't think that having to browse an API website somewhere is the quickest possible way... Now if only the Ruby plug-in would have a slightly better code completion, I'd be even happier.