Will using an IDE with Rails hinder me?

Question

I\'m new to Ruby on Rails and so far, I\'m having a lot of fun learning it. Coming from the .NET world, it\'s been quite a switch as my IDE (Visual Studio 2008) sort of hand

Answer 1

I'm going to take a different stance than the others here. I think for most issues you'll spend a great deal of time poking your head in dark corners just trying to learn the basics when you don't use an IDE. They make your life easier and in most cases actually teach you about the software platform you're using. The code suggestions, automatic formatting, integrated help, etc. help you discover the features of the language much faster than say Notepad.

It is definitely important to know the tool chain but I prefer to examine it as I learn from the IDE. See how and why the IDE chose to do something the way it did. In many cases the IDE will use the best practices and/or most popular practices which you can learn a lot from.