Head First Ruby

Appendix A. Leftovers: The top ten topics (we didn’t cover)

We’ve covered a lot of ground, and you’re almost finished with this book. We’ll miss you, but before we let you go, we wouldn’t feel right about sending you out into the world without a little more preparation. We can’t possibly fit everything you’ll need to know about Ruby into these few pages... (Actually, we did include everything originally, by reducing the type point size to .00004. It all fit, but nobody could read it. So we threw most of it away.) But we’ve kept all the best bits for this Top Ten appendix.

This really is the end of the book. Except for the index, of course. (A must-read!)

#1 Other cool libraries

Ruby on Rails

Sinatra (which we covered in Chapter 14 and Chapter 15) is a great way to build simple web apps. But all apps need new features, and so they grow over time. Eventually you’ll need more than just a place to put your ERB templates. You’ll also need a place to put database configuration, a place to put JavaScript code and CSS styles, a place to put code to tie all this together, and more.

And that’s where Ruby on Rails excels: giving you standardized places to put things.

It starts with the fundamental architecture of every Rails app, which follows the popular Model, View, Controller (MVC) pattern:

• The model is where you put data for your app. Rails can automatically save model objects to a database for ...