In this 4-day, introductory, expert-led course, you will learn foundational Ruby and the theory and practice of Rails. Instructor David A. Black will coach you in Ruby language constructs and the entire Rails development stack: domain modeling with ActiveRecord, controller and view implementation, testing, database migrations, data validation techniques, AJAX fundamentals, and more.
Rails Fundamentals
- Rails overview and walkthrough
- The Model-View-Controller framework architecture
- Creating a new Rails application
- Rails request-handling and URL parsing
- Development-mode deployment
- Generating models and controllers
Basic Ruby Skills and Tools
- Objects and methods
- Scalars: strings, numbers, dates and times
- Collections: arrays, hashes
- Classes and modules
- Control flow and conditionals
- Interactive Ruby (IRB)
- Attributes
- Iterators
- Exception and error-handling
Database Creation and Configuration
- Basic MySQL creation commands
- Configuring database.yml
- Automatically-generated migrations
- Custom migrations
Working with ActiveRecord
- Modeling a domain
- ActiveRecord models and Ruby classes
- ActiveRecord associations
- Writing Rails-friendly SQL
- Data validation techniques
ActionView Essentials
- RHTML templates
- Embedded Ruby (ERb)
- Partial templates
- Built-in and custom helper methods
- Layouts
Using ActionController
- The session and flash facilities
- Planning and writing actions
- Controller/view communication via instance variables
- The special params hash
- Filter methods for specific actions
- Redirecting actions
- Explicit rendering commands
Working with Forms in Rails
- ActionPack form helper methods
- "Magic" form-field population
- Processing forms
- Hash-based batch processing of CGI data
Session management and security
- The session hash
- Password deployment and encryption
- Avoiding SQL injection
Testing in Ruby and Rails
- Ruby's Test/Unit framework
- Writing fixtures
- Unit tests
- Functional tests
- Integration tests
Ajax, JavaScript, and RJS
- JavaScript facilities and support in Rails
- Basic DOM updating with Ajax calls
- RJS templates
- Graceful degradation of Ajax
