Book Image

The Ruby Workshop

By : Akshat Paul, Peter Philips, Dániel Szabó, Cheyne Wallace
Book Image

The Ruby Workshop

By: Akshat Paul, Peter Philips, Dániel Szabó, Cheyne Wallace

Overview of this book

The beauty of Ruby is its readability and expressiveness. Ruby hides away a lot of the complexity of programming, allowing you to work quickly and 'do more' with fewer lines of code. This makes it a great programming language for beginners, but learning any new skill can still be a daunting task. If you want to learn to code using Ruby, but don't know where to start, The Ruby Workshop will help you cut through the noise and make sense of this fun, flexible language. You'll start by writing and running simple code snippets and Ruby source code files. After learning about strings, numbers, and booleans, you'll see how to store collections of objects with arrays and hashes. You'll then learn how to control the flow of a Ruby program using boolean logic. The book then delves into OOP and explains inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. Gradually, you'll build your knowledge of advanced concepts by learning how to interact with external APIs, before finally exploring the most popular Ruby framework ? Ruby on Rails ? and using it for web development. Throughout this book, you'll work on a series of realistic projects, including simple games, a voting application, and an online blog. By the end of this Ruby book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Ruby.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Generating Our First Rails App

Now that you've been introduced to the theory concerning Ruby on Rails, it's time for us to create our first Rails application and learn about the anatomy of a Rails app.

Rails commands are built-in scripts that help to speed development by handling most of the everyday tasks encountered in day-to-day development. Some popular ones are listed here:

  • rails new app_name

    This generates a new Rails application with a file structure for the Rails application.

  • rails server

    This starts a web server named Puma to host a Rails application. This application, by default, is served on localhost port 3000. Puma is a web server that comes prepackaged with Rails. It's best suited for local development.

  • rails console

    This helps you interact with the Rails application using your Terminal. The Rails console is a nifty tool that uses IRB. It's a fast way to test your code for a Rails application.

  • rails test

    By default, Rails comes...