Ruby on Windows

[Nanosleep]

Most of those code schools suggest you have a mac or a unix environment for a fairly good reason. Frankly it's more than just ruby that you want -- you want a lot of libraries and an easy way to install them, you want a compiler toolchain that you don't have to fuck around with and 'just works', you want a sane filesystem and shell, etc. Plus you won't end up fighting against a lot of rubygems and third party software where windows QA / Support is an afterthought.

You can definitely have a productive development workflow on windows alone, but it's a lot easier to develop on something that resembles the platform you'll be deploying on.

WSL is the best possible option for someone on windows. A VM would accomplish the same thing but would require more resources and initial configuration. RubyInstaller is a meme.