7 Great Tools for New Ruby on Rails Developers

Whether you're new to the Rails development community or are a seasoned veteran, here's a list of seven great tools any developer should have in their arsenal.

1. Web Developer plugin for Firefox by Chris Pederick

Simply put, a must have. This tool gives you the ability to view the generated source code on a rendered page, it allows you to disable CSS styling, view the document size, clear session and cookie data (great when working with that kind of stuff), and a ton more. You can download it at Firefox's add-ons page here.

2. SEO for Firefox plugin by Aaron Wall

This is a great tool for search engine optimizers which these days every successful web designer must become. This little plugin lets you view Google's Pagerank rating on any website you desire. It also relays for you a bunch of other nifty details such as the age of a site, an estimated inbound link count, a site's Alexa / Compete.com rank, and more. Grab it here at Aaron Wall's SEO site.

3. Multiple IE Installer

Another great tool, this program lets you install Internet Explorer 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0 all on the same pc! Though these days 5.5 and down are pretty much obsolete, it nevertheless allows you to have both IE6 and IE7 installed and running at once for all your testing needs. Multiple IE can be downloaded on TredoSoft's website for free.

4. Homesite + Railssite plugin

A personal favorite of mine, Homesite is a sleek text editor with a variety of features useful for Rails developers such as global file searching, global file replace, a realtime folder navigation tree, and a host of interface customization features. Coupled with Christian Pelczarski's Railssite plugin and you've got yourself a solid development environment.

5. Navicat MySQL

If you're planning on developing your app over a localhost MySQL database this program is definitely worth looking into. One of its nicest features is it's query builder which like the rest of the program is all graphical. There's a non-commercial free version and a fully functional 30-day trial version available on Navicat's download page.

6. Adobe Photoshop

If you're new to the web development world and don't know Adobe's Photoshop software you should definitely check it out. It's pretty much the premier graphical toolkit out there today. Consequently, it's expensive. You can read more about Adobe's Photoshop program here.

7. CuteFTP

Unless you're planning to run your Rails app inside either a local network or on your own web server, it's necessary that you have a quality FTP program that won't crash on you as you're midway through the upload process. CuteFTP is a well known and established player in the FTP world and is relatively inexpensive. For details on the various versions of CuteFTP, check out GlobeSCAPE's FTP page.

Aside from these great tools there's also a lot of great information out on the web. As a now seasoned CSS veteran, my number one goto internet site while learning was the W3C School's CSS 2 Reference page. You may find that bookmarking it may not even be enough.