Learning Rails

What You’ll Learn

Building a Ruby on Rails application requires mastering a complicated set of skills. You may find that—depending on how you’re working with it, and who you’re working with—you only need part of this tour. That’s fine. Just go as far as you think you’ll need.

At the beginning, you’ll need to install Ruby on Rails. We’ll explore different ways of doing this, with an emphasis on easier approaches to getting Ruby and Rails operational.

Next, we’ll create a very simple Ruby on Rails application, with only a basic view and then a controller that does a very few things. From this foundation we’ll explore ways to create a more sophisticated layout using a variety of tools, learning more about Ruby along the way.

Once we’ve learned how to present information, we’ll take a closer look at controllers and what they can do. Forms processing is critical to most web applications, so we’ll build a few forms and process their results, moving from the simple to the complex.

Forms can do interesting things without storing data, but after a while it’s a lot more fun to have data that lasts for more than just a few moments. The next step is setting up a database to store information and figuring out how the magic of Rails’ ActiveRecord makes it easy to create code that maps directly to database structures—without having to think too hard about database structures or SQL.

Once we have ActiveRecord up and running, we’ll explore scaffolding and its possibilities. Rails scaffolding not only ...