Ruby on Rails 5

Build a Full-Featured Rails 5 Web App From Scratch

Learn how to rapidly develop and deploy database-driven web apps the Rails way.

You can build amazing web applications with Rails, fast! But a huge part of developer productivity comes from understanding the Rails way of doing things. And the best way to learn Rails is by building real applications from scratch, preferrably with seasoned Rails developers at your side.

In this course, we incrementally build a Rails application step-by-step in the videos so you see exactly how it's done. Then, after each video, you apply what you learned by building another Rails application through a series of guided exercises. Learning this way makes everything "click", and it's just more fun! 😀

By developing real applications with real code, you'll gain practical experience putting all the pieces together to craft applications using Rails best practices. And you'll come away with a deeper understanding of both the how and the why.

Working in the context of an application, we explore the following topics in-depth:

Rails Programming Environment

Setting up your working environment and learning how to use it effectively is the first step toward becoming a productive Rails developer. We'll show you how to:

• Install Ruby on Rails on your favorite operating system
• Edit Rails code using the Sublime Text editor
• Use the Rails console and supporting command-line tools effectively
• Search Rails documentation
• Use external RubyGems in your application
• Troubleshoot problems and understand common error messages

Routing

The router is the central dispatch of your application. It receives incoming requests (URLs) and, depending on a set of rules, dispatches the requests to an appropriate controller action. You'll learn how to:

• Define routes that recognize incoming URLs
• Use named route methods to generate URLs based on the routing scheme
• Apply and understand the RESTful routing conventions
• Design apps to take advantage of the REST conventions in Rails

Views and Controllers

Rails has some strong opinions about how web apps should be designed. You've probably heard about the MVC design in the abstract, but we'll break it down in practice so you understand where to put your code and the benefits of a decoupled design. You'll learn how to:

• Write controller actions to handle incoming requests and render views, or redirect to other actions
• Design clean and flexible HTML 5 views using layouts, partials, and helpers
• Write custom view helpers to encapsulate presentation logic
• Remove duplication using before actions

Models and Database Design

Well-designed models are the foundation of any good Rails app. In the simplest form, a model is a Ruby class that encapsulates your application's business logic. But a model also often represents an entity stored in your database. Active Record is the object-relational mapping library that Rails uses to connect your business objects (models) to your database tables. You'll learn how to:

• Manage your database schema with migrations
• Use models to create, read (query), update, and delete records in your database
• Use validations to enforce data integrity
• Design models for better reuse and testability

Test-First Development

Both the Ruby and Rails communities place a high value on testing, and it's for good reason. Writing effective tests allows you to make changes and add new features with confidence. As a result, you're a more productive Rails developer. Throughout the course, you'll learn how to:

• Use a test-first development approach to confidently add new features
• Write and run high-level feature specs using RSpec 2 and Capybara
• Test lower-level business logic by writing model specs using RSpec
• Refactor your application code, safely!

Forms

Want to accept user input and store it in a database? Rails has a whole bunch of conventions to help you create robust and friendly forms. We'll unveil the "magic" and show you how to:

• Design a form for creating and editing data
• Validate form data and provide actionable feedback to the user
• Store submitted form data in a database and dynamically display the data
• Avoid common security pitfalls

CSS and Sass Basics

As a web developer, it's important to understand the basics of web design whether you aim to do it all yourself or plan to work hand-in-hand with a web designer. You'll learn how to:

• Decouple your presentation (style) from the content using CSS stylesheets
• Keep your stylesheets tidy and flexible using Sass extensions including variables, nested rules, and functions
• Effectively use what Rails calls the asset pipeline

Model Relationships

One of the most powerful features of Rails is the ability to create relationships between different models and represent those relationships in a database. For example, if you're developing a movie review app then you'll need to associate each review with a particular movie. To do that properly, it's important to not only understand the Rails conventions but also what goes on behind the scenes. You'll learn how to:

• Design a one-to-many relationship in the database using foreign keys
• Declare associations in the models and use them to create associated records and navigate across the one-to-many relationship
• Use nested resources to design a user interface for a one-to-many relationship
• Encapsulate business logic that emerges once you have rich associations between models

Manage Users

Whether you choose to build your own user account management system or use a gem, it's critical to know how everything fits together. Managing your users' accounts isn't an area of your app that should be a black box. By learning how to design a solid user model and web interface from scratch, you'll be in a better position to adapt, customize, leverage, and troubleshoot either your own code or a third-party gem. We'll start off by looking at how to:

• Design a solid user model
• Securely store passwords with the bcrypt gem
• Declare reasonable validations in the User model
• Create new user accounts with a sign-up form
• Display users' profile pages
• Allow a user to edit or delete their account

Authentication & Session Management

You sign in and out of web apps every day. It's so routine that it's easy to take account management features for granted. But the reality is there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Implementing account management properly in an app requires a solid understanding of sessions, cookies, filters, security concerns, and Rails conventions for authentication and authorization. We'll break it all down and look in-depth at how to:

• Add routes for a singular session resource
• Design a SessionsController to manage the session resource
• Create a sign-in form using form helpers
• Sign in (authenticate) users and remember them with sessions
• Automatically sign in a user when they create an account
• Sign out users

Authorization & Admin Users

Exactly who gets to take certain actions and do certain things in your app? What can signed-in users do? What can't they do? What can admin users do? Authorization rules tend to vary widely depending on the nature of a specific application. The good news is once you understand the basic technique, you can easily design an authorization system that works for your custom needs. You'll learn how to:

• Use before_action filters to restrict access to specific actions
• Restrict access based on signed-in status
• Redirect a user back to his intended URL after he has signed in
• Hide unauthorized features
• Allow special "admin" users to perform admin-only tasks

Many-to-Many & Through Associations

Rails has powerful conventions to help you manage many-to-many associations, but the conventions alone only take you so far. It's up to you to model the associations with the full stack in mind: from the database tables all the way through to the user interface. By way of six distinct examples (three in the videos and three in the exercises), you'll learn how to:

• Design a rich many-to-many association that connects a user to their movie reviews using a join model and a form
• Model a many-to-many association that lets a user "fave" multiple movies with a button
• Create a through association for assigning multiple genres to a movie using checkboxes
• Improve the performance of database queries
• Name associations to better express your domain

Custom Routes

URLs are the user interface of the web. We tweet and email them. We bookmark pages we want to return to later. We use embedded links to connect across web apps. As part of your app's user interface, it's critical that your URLs are both expressive and friendly. The default resource URLs are a good start, but the Rails router gives us a lot of flexibility when it comes to customizing URLs. And well-designed URLs might also end up driving more search traffic to your site! You'll learn how to:

• Generate friendly URLs for better SEO, bookmarking, and curb appeal
• Customize routes to handle scenarios beyond the basic resource routes
• Use route parameters and constraints

Deployment

Putting your Rails app into production shouldn't cause fear and trembling. Deploying Rails apps has gotten a lot easier over the years thanks in large part to cloud services such as Heroku. We'll show you how to deploy your Rails app for the first time, and incrementally push out updates. You'll learn how to:

• Set up a (free) Heroku account
• Put your application code in a Git repository
• Deploy your app to your Heroku account
• Run remote Heroku commands such as to migrate your production database
• Upload image files and store them on Amazon S3
• Roll out updates to your app with ease!

Best Practices, Tricks, and Techniques

Now standing up a Rails app that just works isn't the same as designing a good Rails app. Mastering Rails—writing compact, readable, and flexible code—starts by learning the conventions, practices, and idioms fostered by the Rails community.

And having developed with Rails for 15+ years, we've learned our own tips, tricks, and techniques for creating solid Rails apps. So, throughout the course, we discuss design principles and best practices to help you get the most out of Rails!

What You'll Get

Lifetime access to everything you need!

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No monthly subscription. No time limit. Start when you want and revisit as often as you like. In no time you'll go from "Argh, I'm lost!" to Aha, now I TOTALLY get it!"

Rails Courses

• Both Rails 5 Courses
• Rails 6 Free Upgrade

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Pro Bundle

• Both Rails 5 Courses
• Rails 6 Pro Bundle

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For New Rails Developers

Need a fresh start or a refresher? This course is for you!

Getting started with Rails?

Perhaps you've been intrigued by Rails, but haven't yet had the opportunity to learn it comprehensively from scratch. It all starts here! You'll learn the fundamentals of developing web apps with Rails so you're ready to create your first Rails app or jump right into an existing app. No prior experience with Rails is assumed.

If you're new to the Ruby programming language or new to object-oriented programming in general, we strongly recommend taking our Ruby course prior to this course.

Struggling to put all the pieces together?

Rails is a structured framework that relies on conventions to optimize development time and minimize the amount of code you have to write. This makes developing web apps a bit easier… once you understand how everything fits together. Through live coding, animated visuals, and hands-on exercises, you'll learn how to build a full-featured web app so you're more confident (and less frustrated) writing your own Rails code.

Ready for a refresh and a restart?

If you started learning Rails a while back but haven't used it in earnest, this course will help you quickly get back up to speed with the latest version of Rails and current development techniques!

Created with 💛 by
Mike and Nicole Clark

We've been using Rails since version 1.0. In fact, Mike helped build and launch one of the first production Rails apps way back in 2005. Since then together we've built countless Rails apps, including the suite of apps that power this site and our custom video training platform. We still write Rails code almost every day, and we love it!

Mike co-taught the first official Rails course in 2006 which lead to us starting this little training company we call The Pragmatic Studio. He's also the author of Advanced Rails Recipes, co-author of Agile Web Development with Rails, and author of Pragmatic Project Automation.

As with all our courses, this is the course we wish we had when learning Rails. One that's easy to jump into, doesn't get bogged down in syntax minutiae, and focuses on building a real Rails app. Nothing is held back: we tackle complex features by breaking down the concepts so everything makes sense. We hope you enjoy it!