Brady Somerville - Beginning Rails 6: From Novice to Professional

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484257159 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

In the past several years, the popularity of the Web has exploded to the point that it touches nearly every facet of our lives. It touches everything we do; ordering food, getting rides, and match-making are easy examples to think of. Even some refrigerators now integrate with the Internet. Ruby on Rails has played a part in fueling that explosion. This 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 firm grasp on the Ruby language and the Rails framework.

Chapter 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 walks you through installing Ruby, Rails, and the SQLite database. It is broken down by operating system and, when finished, 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 dives right in and starts the blog application that well use throughout the rest of the book. Well continually build on this application, enhancing and refactoring as we go along. Youll create your first model in this chapter, the Article model. Well cover how migrations work and even get Rails to construct our first scaffold. At the end of this chapter, youll have a working blog application, although it will be lacking features. Well add those in the following chapters.

Chapter slows down a little bit from the previous chapter and takes you on a tour of the Ruby language. If youve used Ruby for a while and feel comfortable with it, feel free to skim over this. If youre new to Ruby, this chapter will teach you everything you need to know to get started with Rails. Ruby is an easy language to pick up, as the syntax is very inviting and easy to read. Although we wont add any code to our blog application here, you will get to use the Ruby language inside the Ruby console.

Chapter shows you how Rails uses Active Record to let you interact with a variety of databases. Rails abstracts away the difficult bits (unless you need them) and lets you interact with databases in an object-oriented (OO) way. Youll learn how to create new records, find records, and even update and delete them. Well also apply some basic validations so we can be sure our data are just the way they should be.

Chapter expounds on the previous chapter. Youll 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 define those relations. Your models for the blog application will have complex relations and validations.

In Chapter , well cover the view and controller parts of MVC. We will flesh out the blog application and walk through the code that Rails generated for the scaffold of our controllers and views.

Chapter modifies the controllers and views in more advanced ways, and at this point, the features of our blog application have come together. Youll learn about controller callbacks and strong parameters that were added in Rails 4. Well also give our application a fresh coat of paint with some Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Chapter goes over the Asset Pipeline that was added in Rails 3.2, as well as Webpacker which was added in Rails 6, and shows how to add JavaScript and CSS to your application. Well enhance our application with JavaScript dabbling in Ajax and DOM manipulation. At the end of this chapter, your application will have a nice layer of spit and polish.

Chapter provides a tour of Active Storage, a component introduced in Rails 5, which provides an out-of-the-box experience for storing, processing, and retrieving uploaded files in your Rails application. We will use Active Storage to add the ability to add cover images to our blogs articles.

Chapter introduces Action Text, a new component introduced in Rails 6, which provides a batteries-included approach to adding rich text capabilities to your Rails application. Well use Action Text to allow article authors to include HTML in their articles using a WYSIWYG editor.