So, I only recently began doing the Ruby and Rails thing and I figured I'd jump in, learn all that I can, and try things the smart way from the beginning. I have 5 years in Java development, and coming from "the other side", RESTful Rails is definitely the way to go.

Geoffrey Grosenbach's Peepcode screencast/railscast/videocast is a great place to get started learning REST. Before I started this tutorial, I created a few Rails applications to see how good Rails could be. After I began this screencast, I truly realized the potential of REST.

The screencast begins with a brief introduction of REST and how it manages to morph your once simple Rails app into a full-blown web service, providing with simple changes such as adding '.xml' to the end of the url.

He then goes on to set-up the project, and provides explanations for each step of the set-up. Geoffrey speaks clearly through the cast, though when followed, you will still need to pause the cast to 'catch up' regularly. I watched it the first time, and coded with him the second... it took me hours to move only minutes along in the cast the second time, though I was making notes and there were a few errors along the way (more on that later).

Next, Geoffrey gets into how restful links, buttons, and forms work. All the source code for the project is also included, so if you ever have any questions, you can look at his code.

This is followed by the respond_to section of the cast, which explains how to return javascript, xml, and more (Visa!)

The next section may be the most confusing for individuals, but it's also one of the most rewarding: Nested resources.

Here, Geoffrey explains how a belongs_to and has_many relationship can be used with REST.

The last major section involves a bit of testing (functional). He runs autotest here (which basically runs the Rake command whenever a file is changed), though he doesn't explain how to install it (everything else he does is pretty well explained, however, his information is found on his website). This area was definitely interesting and I plan on buying the Test-driven development (test-first development) screencast from Geoffrey/Peepcode as well.

Geoffrey ends the cast with a myriad of tips.

Overall, I definitely recommend the screencast and I plan on buying more in the future!

I did all my developing on Windows XP Pro (I want a Macbook Pro). I started with InstallRails (1.2 I believe) and after numerous problems with it, I went ahead and did it all from scratch. I used Ruby 1.8.5 and Rails Edge 1.2.1