If you have to write small programs and want to use the power of Rails you can use Socrates as a starting point.
You will have app/models, migrations, bundle, command line parser.
If you add a Gem in the Gemfile, don't forget to require it in the lib/application.rb
Have a nice time
Install ruby. Then install rubygems and do
How to create your development database (if you want to use mysql)
mysql -e "drop database socrates_development" ; mysql -e "create database socrates_development DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci;"; rake db:migrate --trace
ruby app/main.rb