Newbie: Set-up RoR dev environment on Mac os x Mavericks is painful

One good ruby shop (Thoughtbot) has published several articles on this topic. And they released their script to handle this : https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop.

Boxen is another way to prepare and setup your machines for work. There are other alternatives.

Use something like RVM [1] to get the base Ruby system in place, then install the Rails gem and you're good to go. If you'd rather do it all in one, RVM will install Rails for you during setup if you include the '--rails' flag.

[1] https://rvm.io/

I like this setup guide for a rails dev environment: https://github.com/red-green-refactor/osx-fresh-install

This will guide you through the process: http://installrails.com/

Without much hassle ... (welcome to development :)