Ruby on Rails Fast Track Training

Learn how to design, develop and deploy amazing web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework

Do you want to learn Ruby on Rails? Are you having trouble getting started? Are existing tutorials out there confusing you more than helping you to understand the Ruby language and Rails framework?

This course is not about learning Ruby or Rails feature by feature. This course is about understanding the language and framework, and getting productive with building Ruby on Rails apps as quickly as humanly possible.

This course assumes that you already are familiar with web development from another language such as PHP. You should already know how to use the Unix command line and some kind of source control such as Git. You don't need to know Ruby before taking this class, but it will help you get up to speed faster.

The objective of this training is that at the end of our two day brain dump, you should be well on your way to building high quality web applications with Ruby on Rails.

The Course

I have been developing web applications since 1999. I mostly developed in PHP until a few years ago when I finally made the transition to Rails and never looked back.

For me, learning Ruby on Rails was one of the most painful exercises in learning a new language and framework. Most of the tutorials out there skipped over many idioms and features of the Ruby language. They show how "easy" Rails is by just adding a few magic lines of code here and there. This is great, but next to useless for actually understanding what is happening under the hood. Once I understood what was going on underneath all this magic, I became super productive in Rails.

That's how I will be approaching teaching you Rails. To start, we will cover object-oriented Ruby and write our own MVC Rack-based blog application. This will show you how Ruby web apps work, how to hook up with a database and how to render using ERB views.

We'll then do a deep dive into Rails. We will take a project-based approach and build an actual web application that will look pretty decent! We will cover the Rails architecture, scaffolding, routing, asset pipeline, gems, testing and deployment. I'll also point you to invaluable resources where you can continue on your journey to mastering Rails.

Pre-requisites

Note: This class is not for complete beginners to web development. Here's what you need to already know:

You should already be familiar with web development on another language - e.g. PHP, .net, Java, Python.
You should already know HTML/CSS/Javascript.
You should be familiar with Unix command line basics.
You should be mentally prepared for an insanely intense 2 day brain dump.

Software-wise, here's what you need installed before coming to class.

A working Ruby 2.x environment. Check out Rails Installer or Boxen.
Ruby on Rails. Install using gem install rails. Make sure that you can create a new Rails app using rails new [appname] and run it with rails server.
ImageMagick. I recommend using Homebrew to install this.
Sqlite. Also recommend using Homebrew for this.
(Optional) MySQL or Postgres if you want to be a bit more advanced and run your app off a real DB.
Your favorite code editor. I recommend Sublime.