Ruby on Rails - Essentials

Ruby's syntax, object model, and major built-in classes

• Basic object-orientation principles
• Program design with Ruby
• The use of Ruby as a "scripting" tool for administrative tasks
• Testing basics and Ruby testing facilities

Basic Ruby concepts and features

• "Everything's an object"
• Local variables and assignment
• Top-level method definitions
• Arithmetic and logical operators
• Global variables
• The default object (self)

Object orientation in Ruby

• Messages and methods
• Ruby's class model
• Inheritance
• The object method lookup-path

Classes and modules

• Class methods
• Constants
• Module "mix-ins" in classes
• Modules as namespaces
• Instance method definition syntax
• Reopening class and module definitions
• Overriding methods

Instances and attributes

• Instance variables
• Attribute setter and getter techniques
• Ruby and the "Equal Access Principle"

Strings, symbols, and regular expressions

• Basic string manipulation and indexing
• Symbols and the symbol table
• Regular expression syntax
• Pattern-matching with scan, sub, and match

Collection objects and iterators

• Array, Hash, and Range classes
• Code blocks and iteration
• Creating iterators with the Enumerable module
• Collection filtering, selecting, and transforming
• Enumerators and external iteration

Object dynamism

• Adding singleton methods to objects
• Modular extension of per-object behavior
• Singleton classes
• Extending existing classes

Threads

• Starting, running, stopping threads
• Threads and variable scope
• Thread-safety considerations

Lambdas and function objects

• Creating first-class functions
• Lambda argument semantics
• Variable scope and closures
• Block, Proc, lambda interaction

Metaprogramming

• The eval family of methods
• Programmatic method creation
• Runtime reflection on objects
• Traversing ObjectSpace
• method_missing and other hooks and callbacks

Exception handling

• The Exception class hierarchy
• Raising exceptions
• Rescue and ensure clauses
• Writing your own exception classes

File and I/O operations

• Keyboard input and screen output
• Basic file reading and writing
• File handles as iterators
• Low-level I/O techniques

Date, time, and numeric types

• Date, Time, and DateTime classes
• Date calculation and parsing
• Integers and floating-point numbers

The standard library

• StringIO hybrid objects
• Struct and OpenStruct
• Math extensions
• FileUtils and Pathname
• Socket and network programming facilities
• Administrative and system libraries

Testing in Ruby

• Unit testing principles
• The MiniTest and TestUnit libraries

Ruby tools

• Interactive Ruby (irb)
• Embedded Ruby (erb)
• The RubyGems packaging system
• Rake task management utility

Rails Fundamentals

• Rails overview and walkthrough
• The Model-View-Controller framework architecture
• Creating a new Rails application
• Rails request-handling and URL parsing
• Development-mode deployment
• Generating models and controllers

Database Creation and Configuration

• Basic MySQL creation commands
• Configuring database.yml
• Automatically-generated migrations
• Custom migrations

Working with ActiveRecord

• Modeling a domain
• ActiveRecord models and Ruby classes
• ActiveRecord associations
• Writing Rails-friendly SQL
• Data validation techniques

ActionView Essentials

• RHTML templates
• Embedded Ruby (ERb)
• Partial templates
• Built-in and custom helper methods
• Layouts

Using ActionController

• The session and flash facilities
• Planning and writing actions
• Controller/view communication via instance variables
• The special params hash
• Filter methods for specific actions
• Redirecting actions
• Explicit rendering commands

Working with Forms in Rails

• ActionPack form helper methods
• "Magic" form-field population
• Processing forms
• Hash-based batch processing of CGI data

Routing and REST

• The routes.rb file
• Simple route customization
• Named routes
• Resource mapping
• Default REST action names

Session management and security

• The session hash
• Password deployment and encryption
• Avoiding SQL injection

Deployment

• Distributed deployment with Capistrano
• Mongrel and mongrel_cluster
• Load-balancing with Apache and nginx

Testing in Rails

• Writing fixtures
• Unit tests
• Functional tests
• Integration tests

AJAX, JavaScript, and RJS

• JavaScript facilities and support in Rails
• Basic DOM updating with AJAX calls
• RJS templates
• Graceful degradation of AJAX

Reflective Rails

• The Rails application console
• Examining the Rails source code tree
• The API docs