Introduction to Ruby on Rails
What is Ruby on Rails?
Ruby on Rails (often shortened to Rails or RoR) is a web development framework written in the Ruby programming language. Some popular examples of websites using Rails are Hulu, BaseCamp, and GitHub.
The biggest draw for Rails is the radical improvement in productivity compared to other web application platforms. Rails makes programming web applications easier by making several assumptions about what every developer needs to get started. This allows you to write less code while accomplishing more than many other languages and frameworks. Longtime Rails developers also report that it makes web application development more fun.
Prerequisites of this Course
This course assumes that the student is an experienced web developer and is familiar with:
- Basic web development: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Web application development: HTTP, server-side scripting
- Object-Oriented Programming
- SQL and RDBMS concepts
This course will focus on the Rails part of Ruby on Rails. This means that knowing the Ruby programming language is not a prerequisite of this course, nor will we dwell too much on the language. We will only discuss just enough Ruby as we go along the lessons – don’t worry; you can still do a lot in Ruby on Rails even with limited Ruby knowledge.
Learning Ruby beforehand will help, of course. Some suggested sites for learning Ruby:
Required Software
For this training course, we will be using the following software:
- Ruby 2.1, but 1.9.3 above is ok
- Ruby on Rails 4.0.5
- RSpec 2.14
- SQLite 3 or MySQL 5