Ruby on Rails Level 1 Book

Setup & Introduction

Downloading the Class Files

Before You Begin: Installing Ruby on Rails

• Installing Command Line Tools
• Installing Homebrew
• Installing Ruby Version Manager (RVM)
• Installing Ruby & Rails

Section 1

Setting Up: Do This Before Other Exercises!

• Setting up your class files

Scaffolding

• Getting started
• Generating a scaffold
• Adding content

Adjusting the Templates Created by Scaffolding

• Formatting Rails
• Coding simple styles in Rails
• Coding title bar titles
• Redirecting the site root page
• Editing the CSS
• Adding basic security

Ruby Fundamentals: Classes & Objects

• Everything in Ruby is an object
• Defining a class

Section 2

Ruby Fundamentals: Properties & Variables

• Properties of objects
• Instance variables & local variables
• Global variables

Ruby Fundamentals: Manipulating Variables

• Creating strings in Ruby
• Simple string methods: changing case
• Substrings
• Ranges
• Comparing strings
• Regular expressions

Ruby: Sanitizing User Input & Control Structures

• Sanitizing user input
• Integers & decimals
• If/else, unless, & case statements
• Constants
• Symbols

Ruby: Collections

• Arrays: the simplest collections
• Hashes
• Enumerators
• Common iterators

Section 3

MVC: Creating a Model, View, & Controller

• MVC: model-view-controller
• Creating a new Rails site for Flix
• Generating a new model
• Editing a migration file
• Populating a database with a seed file
• Creating a new controller

Integrating the Front-End Designer’s Code

• Incorporating the designer’s HTML & CSS
• Incorporating the JavaScript files, images, & fonts

MVC: Controllers & Routing

• Resourceful vs. non-resourceful routing
• Assigning instance variables
• What if the names don’t match?
• Optional bonus: redirects

MVC: Views

• Creating a view
• Adding dynamic data
• Rendering a partial
• Optional bonus: rendering a view

Section 4

Forms in Rails: Creating the Form

• form_tag & form_for
• Checkboxes, radio buttons, & select boxes
• Adding a dropdown menu
• Adding a date selector & submit button

Forms in Rails: Processing & Editing Form Data

• Making the form work: defining a create method
• Making an edit form
• Optional bonus: DRYing up the code even more

Model Creation & Management

• Generating & rolling back a migration
• Updating views & controllers to match an updated model
• Viewing the contents of a database

Exploring & Validating Models

• Exploring database contents in Rails console
• Adding an object in Rails console
• Editing an object in Rails console
• Adding basic validation to a model

Section 5

Model Methods & Scopes

• Creating a model method for runtime
• Scopes
• Optional bonus: DRYing up the scopes
• Additional bonus: adding the tab highlight behavior

Model Relationships

• Creating a model for cast members
• Adding objects to the cast members model in Rails Console
• Updating views to include the cast members model
• Creating a genre model
• Adding a genre field to the edit form

Model Relationships: Creating a Genre View

• Creating a genre controller
• Creating a genre view
• Improving the look of the genre view

Section 6

Introduction to Testing

• Fixtures
• Basic tests: assert & refute
• Other assert methods
• The importance of error messages
• Writing simple tests using fixtures
• Optional bonus: writing tests using embedded Ruby code
• Additional bonus: helpers

MVC Tests

• What to test
• Testing a custom validation
• Testing a model method
• Testing a controller

Gems: Plugins for Ruby

• What is a gem?
• Gemfile and Gemfile.lock
• Installing a new gem
• Adding sign in & sign out links
• Adding basic user authentication
• Removing the ability for users to register themselves

Bonus Material

Managing Your Code with Git

• Creating a new Git repository
• Tracking changes & adding files
• Committing code to Git
• GitHub: pushing your code to the cloud
• Committing a change to the repository
• Cloning a repository

Reference Material

Basic Structure of Scaffolding