Getting Started with Ruby on Rails

Course details

If you travel off the beaten track you will find fine Wine.

Coming Soon! I am in the process of adding material on Rails 4 and Ruby 2.0. Initially this will lead into an Advanced section but during the next month or so I will revise all the introductory material too. There are some exciting things to talk about with Rails 4. As a first step I have completed a lecture that shows you how to stream live data from server into an html element in a view on the client's browser. It's really cool and is a clear demonstration that Rails can now cover some of the use cases that up to now needed a move node.js. More material on live streaming is in preparation.

This course will provide all the background you need to help you engineer high quality sites like these in Ruby on Rails. I start with the basics of the Ruby programming language specifically focusing on the features that are exploited in Rails to support productivity and quality. I then lead you progressively through the main features of the Rails Framework; the course has been built from the ground up using Rails 3.2 so fast tracks you straight into the current release version.

I did not want to complicate the technology chapters with too much on process. However process is important and so I include a chapter that shows you how to put example projects under version control and adopt continuous testing. I will show you how to use RSpec and Cucumber to drive your development by first specifying the behaviour that is required and then incrementally delivering until your tests show that you have satisfied those requirements. I will also show you how to use version control and deploy your increments into Heroku so that your customer may review them and introduce you to the IDE RubyMine.

As well as learning about Rails you will also get a good grounding of standards based development of the client side using Html5 Css3 and JavaScript. And just as a bonus there is some background material on object modelling to help you think more deeply about the Business model that is at the heart of your application.

Whilst Rails as a Framework gives you many tools to enhance the productivity and fun of building Web Applications significant added power comes from the Rails ecosystem and the Gems that members of the ecosystem contribute freely. I want to introduce you into that ecosystem for it is these gemstones that enable us to build cathedrals.

Finally I should mention that I teach this material at Masters level. So this is very much a living course. I will update the material as new versions of Rails come out. And I will respond to requests of the nature of "why don't you cover this?" by creating additional content where there is a demand (unless I genuinely doubt the relevance or value of what has been requested!).