how to use ruby on a mac and how to get HTML for this site?

For the Ruby programming, I recommend making a trip to your local bookstore to find a good book on it. The online tutorials I've found are minimal at best. Find a book with tutorials and make sure there is a chapter on setup. It will be worth the investment.

As for viewing html for a site the easiest way is to right-click and "View Source".

 

You can edit both Ruby and HTML code with whatever text editor you want, because both are just written as plain text. So you can open up such a file in TextEdit (in text mode, not rich text) and start playing around. Save HTML files as .html (like “hello.html”) and Ruby files as .rb (like “test.rb”).

Now, as for running: you can drag HTML files into Safari and it should show the page.

Ruby is kind of a different beast, as you need something to run the Ruby code. That’s where the ruby program comes in. Go to Applications, then Utilities, and open Terminal. Then in the terminal, you will want to go to the directory where you keep your code, and then type “ruby myfile.rb”. Ruby should then interpret and run your program – or give an error message indicating what’s wrong with your program.

If you’re not familiar with the terminal, check out this introduction by MacApper.

This is a lot to grasp at once, and lots of it might have gone over your head. That’s okay. Like Darth.Titan suggested, you should go to a book store or library and see if you can find a book on HTML and one on Ruby to gently introduce you to each of these languages. Know that you won’t learn either of those overnight.

Maybe you don’t want to become a HTML or Ruby programmer, but just get X or Y done. In that case, try out programs like iWeb (comes with your Mac) or RapidWeaver for websites, and something like Automator (also included) for automating tasks.

 

I didn’t look at the site closely, but most large sites or web applications are made by a small team of people, prices ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Apart from Ruby, there are many popular back-end languages for building websites. Some of them are ASP.NET (which supports many languages), PHP and Java.

The web development field consists of quite some different jobs though. There are designers who design the way a website works and looks (sometimes these are divided up into multiple jobs), font-end developers who write HTML, CSS and Javascript code, and back-end developers who do the application and database logic. Well, if there aren’t separate “database people” on the project.

There roles are not set in stone, and many a site are created by just one or two people. You can, most definitely, make websites and webapps on your own.