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)

Models, Migrations, and Databases

Active Record is the power behind the model in Rails – the "M" in MVC – which manages data and business logic. Active Record helps in the creation of business objects whose data exists in a database. All this interaction is managed very easily since Active Record is an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) system.

Note

To know more about ORM, see https://packt.live/33BjMXZ.

Rails, by default, comes with SQLite support, which is a lightweight serverless database. However, with production applications, it's possible to end up overloading SQLite, so it is advised to use a more stable database, such as PostgreSQL or MySQL. For development, we will also use SQLite, but when we deploy our application for production, we will use PostgreSQL. The switch from SQLite to PostgreSQL is very simple.

To see your database settings, open config/database.yml:

# SQLite version 3.x
#   gem install sqlite3
# &...