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Introduction
What Is This Book About?
In the past several years, the Web has exploded to include information on every facet of our lives. It touches everything
we do; even some refrigerators have included access to the Internet. Ruby on Rails has played a part in fueling
that explosion. is book will equip you with the knowledge you need to build real production web applications.
It leads you through installing the required prerequisites on Windows, OS X, or Linux and then jumps straight into
building applications. It is meant for the novice programmer who has some command line experience but little or no
programming experience. At the end of the book, you should have a rm grasp on the Ruby language and the Rails
framework.
Chapter 1 introduces you to the current web landscape and then goes over some of the ideals and principles that
the Rails framework is built on. It teaches you about the MVC paradigm and shows how Rails implements each piece
of that paradigm (model, view, and controller).
Chapter 2 walks you through installing Ruby, Rails, and the SQLite database. It is broken down by operating
system, and when nished, will give a level platform among all three. You should be able to follow along with the book
no matter which platform you choose. It also will show you how to build a quick “Hello World” application to make
sure everything is working correctly.
Chapter 3 dives right in and starts the blog application that we’ll use throughout the rest of the book. We’ll
continually build on this application, enhancing and refactoring as we go along. You’ll create your rst model in this
chapter, the article model. We’ll cover how migrations work and even get Rails to construct our rst scaold. At the
end of this chapter, you’ll have a working blog application, although it will be lacking features. We’ll add those in the
following chapters.
Chapter 4 slows down a little bit from the previous chapter and takes you on a tour of the Ruby language. If you’ve
used Ruby for a while and feel comfortable with it, feel free to skim over this. If you’re new to Ruby, this chapter will
teach you everything you need to know to use Rails. Ruby is an easy to pick up language, and the syntax is very inviting
and easy to read. Although we won’t add any code to our blog application here, you will get to use the Ruby language
inside the Ruby console.
Chapter 5 shows you how Rails uses Active Record to let you interact with any number of databases. Rails
abstracts away the dicult bits (unless you need them) and lets you interact with databases in an object-oriented way.
You’ll learn how to create new records, nd records, and even update and delete them. We’ll also apply some basic
validations so we can be sure our data are just the way they should be.
Chapter 6 expounds on the previous chapter. You’ll dive deeper into Active Record and your models. You will
build more complex validations and custom instance methods. A major component of this chapter is the relation
between your models and how Rails lets you dene those relations. Your models for the blog application will have
complex relations and validations.
In Chapter 7 we’ll cover the view and controller parts of MVC. We will esh out the blog application and walk
through the code that Rails generated for the scaold of our controllers and views.
Chapter 8 modies the controller and views in more advanced ways, and at this point the features of our blog
application have come together. You’ll learn about controller callbacks and strong parameters that were added in
Rails 4. We’ll also give our application a fresh coat of paint with some Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
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