More Watir ....

A few blog posts ago I narrated how I installed Ruby and Watir on Windows and posted my first test script.

Getting started is usually the hardest part of the learning experience. The reason being that you don't know where or how to get started. Luckily there is a plethora of resources and lots of good samaritans on the web sharing their experiences and solutions on forums and on their personal blogs.

Today I'm going to enumerate the resources I found on the web in the order that helped me get started with Watir.

http://wtr.rubyforge.org/index.html
For an overview of what Watir is and possibly how and why you need Watir

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/
Before Watir, you must install Ruby.

http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Tutorial
This tutorial has everything you need to know on how to install Watir and its prerequisites. It also contains everything you need to know to get the basics down and start writing simple test scripts.

http://www.rubycentral.com/book/
Pretty soon you'll need to learn more advanced stuff like objects and classes. The online book is a great resource for this.

http://rasta.rubyforge.org/index.html
At some point you may want to organize your test scripts. One framework I found that works is Rasta.

http://rubyonwindows.blogspot.com/2007/03/automating-excel-with-ruby-application.html
Some people may not like the restrictions imposed by Rasta and would like to setup their own framework with MS Excel. Ruby is perfectly capable of manipulating Excel. VB for application developers will feel at home with Ruby.