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)

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we were introduced to the Ruby on Rails framework and how the MVC pattern helps us to create a modular web application. We also learned about the fundamentals of the Rails framework, the anatomy of a Rails application, how to save data in a database, how to interact with data using views, and how to test Ruby on Rails code using the Rails console.

In this chapter, we will dive deep into more advanced topics, such as creating associations between models using Active Record association. Like everything else, Rails has built-in helper methods to assist us. Associations are very commonly used in real-world applications. If we take the example of the citireview application from the previous chapter, we can easily see a relation between a review and its comments. These are joints that link one model to another with the use of primary and foreign keys. We will learn about six types of such associations provided by Rails.

Then, we will understand...