Ruby on Rails Programming

Learn how to program using Ruby on Rails. Covering the basics of the Ruby programming language and basic building blocks of Ruby on Rails.

This course will provide you with everything you need to get programming using Ruby on Rails.

The courses cover the following over around 15 hours of online multimedia driven content.

• An introduction to the Ruby programming language. This course demonstrates what makes Ruby unique as a language and how it can be leveraged to build robust applications. It also provides a step-by-step guide on how to install Ruby on various operating systems.

• Practical components of Ruby development including how to work with its file system. Exploring methods that enable Ruby programs to generate files and dynamically add data to preexisting files. In addition you will practically apply this knowledge through incorporating Ruby gems into an application and also building a Ruby program that connects to an outside API and works with the data which is sent back.

• Examine the basic building blocks of the program and dive deep into its various data structures such as arrays. Learn how Ruby uses dynamic typecasting and how to use the struct class to encapsulate data with methods and behaviors. Finally you will walk through how to automate tasks in Ruby such as calculating sums.

• Start creatinging a full featured web application using the Ruby on Rails framework, and in order to accomplish this you will be leveraging a number of tools in addition to Rails, such as RSpec for automated testing, Heroku for easily deploying to the Internet, and then GitHub for our version control management system. This section concludes with you creating the app and pushing the code to a centralized Github repository, along with learning how to use the Unix terminal commands.

• Cover how the model view controller design pattern works in the Ruby on Rails framework, specifically discussing the rolls and best practices associated with each element. Walk through the file system and become familiar with items such as the respective roles of our config directory, how the asset management sytem is structured, plus many other items, and lastly, how we utilize the Gemfile. The Ruby on Rails development stack works very closely with version control management systems such as Github and we will cover what Git is, why it is important and how to implement it into our application. Routing is one of the core fundamentals of any web application, and we will walk through how to setup a root homepage. We will finish up this course by building a scaffold into our application that interacts with our database, has form elements for the user, renders a database query on the page and is tested using RSpec.

• Walk through the process of building an authentication system into an application, normally this would be a very challenging process due to all of the requirements associated with an enterprise level user management system. However, you will be leveraging the Devise gem, which will provide all of the functionality that you're going to need. Next, you'll integrate several authorization mechanisms that show and hide elements on the view depending on whether a user is signed in or not. You will also be integrating the popular active admin gem to generate a full administrator dashboard, including a variety of configuration changes that need to be made in order to have the gem work in conjunction with other gems in the Gemfile of our project. As a final feature build for the project you will walk through how to create an API for your application and have it respond to both JSON and XML data requests. Finally you will cover some additional resources and popular gems that can be used in your Ruby on Rails educational journey.

• You will review all of the available data types utilized by the ActiveRecord module, how to configure relationships between tables, adding and removing columns, and how to perform database migrations. One of the best ways of connecting to a database in Rails is the Rails console. It's especially adept at showing if relationships are setup properly in an application and the Rails console allows for quickly analyzing how methods will interact with the data. Next you will deploy our application to the web by leveraging the Heroku platform, including the production confirmation requirements and having it display your application properly. Then walk through a number of key features of our application, including how to add design and style elements into our program by integrating the Twitter Bootstrap framework. After integrating some style elements you will build out two major features for our CRM program: a file uploader and a file downloader.

• Covering a wide range of feature build outs, including some advanced development techniques, such as creating custom classes to handle a date range search feature. In being able to create custom classes to handle some of the non trivial aspects of the application, you will learn some key Rails fundamentals such as how to call the custom class in a controller and how to manage the data flow from other models. Next you will build a fully functional search engine into the application by leveraging the built in Postgres full text search functionality. As the program's data begins to grow, being able to quickly sort the data queries in the application view would be a very helpful feature, and with that in mind we will walk through how to build a number of custom Rails methods that will let users toggle the sort order in one of the table's columns simply by clicking on it. Lastly you will integrate pagination into our program, which will improve our page load performance, manage the user interface and allow for an improved level of control in regards to what is rendered on the page.

Anybody looking to develop a career in Programming. This course assumes you are already familiar with basic text editing in a Windows or Linux environment.

None

• Computer Programmer
• App Developer