Your development environment will continue to be available at lite.nitrous.io. Remember: you'll need to cd your_existing_project_name before running rails commands like rails server.
You're free to have multiple Rails apps on this; run rails new new_project_name from the home directory (you can get there by typing cd ~) if you want to start a new one.
RailsBridge has a great collection of step-by-step resources for installing Rails on various environments.
- Chris Pine's Learn to Program is a great intro to Ruby for people with no previous programming experience
- Russ Olsen's Eloquent Ruby might be better if you've dabbled before
- Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial is a wonderful in-depth guide to Rails that will walk you through building a Rails app in much more detail
- Heroku has a good guide on getting started deploying Rails 4 on Heroku.
- The Ruby Koans help you learn Ruby by going through a sequence of many small exercises.
- RailsBridge has writeups on several other Rails projects if you'd like step-by-step guides through other Rails apps
- Check out local Ruby meetups. Learn Ruby in DC is particularly aimed at helping new Rubyists get started, but any of them should be welcoming to beginners (though the topics may not resonate just yet).
- Join the DC Tech Slack team and hop in the Ruby room. Also join the Ruby Newbies Slack team.
If anyone finds other resources that they enjoyed or found helpful, please share them! I'd be happy to update this list.
And as always, feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.
Best, James