Book Image

From PHP to Ruby on Rails

By : Bernard Pineda
4 (1)
Book Image

From PHP to Ruby on Rails

4 (1)
By: Bernard Pineda

Overview of this book

Are you a PHP developer looking to take your first steps into the world of Ruby development? From PHP to Ruby on Rails will help you leverage your existing knowledge to gain expertise in Ruby on Rails. With a focus on bridging the gap between PHP and Ruby, this guide will help you develop the Ruby mindset, set up your local environment, grasp the syntax, master scripting, explore popular Ruby frameworks, and find out about libraries and gems. This book offers a unique take on Ruby from the perspective of a seasoned PHP developer who initially refused to learn other technologies, but never looked back after taking the leap. As such, it teaches with a language-agnostic approach that will help you feel at home in any programming language without learning everything from scratch. This approach will help you avoid common mistakes such as writing Ruby as if it were PHP and increase your understanding of the programming ecosystem as a whole. By the end of this book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of Ruby, its ecosystem, and how it compares to PHP, enabling you to build robust and scalable applications using Ruby on Rails.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1:From PHP to Ruby Basics
8
Part 2:Ruby and the Web

Setting Up Our Local Environment

As a developer, you probably already know that one of the key skillsets that you need to start programming is to install the programming language itself onto your computer. We need a way to start testing code besides our head, as our brains are not the best language compilers. But what does installing the language really mean?

Coming from PHP, this could mean installing the binary interpreter of PHP on our computer so that we can run PHP, open a browser, and then away we go. Or it could mean downloading the PHP source code, compiling it, and generating our own binary with the compilation options we choose. In Ruby, we not only have very similar options to these, but also many more ways to install the Ruby interpreter on our local machine.

In this chapter, we will explore different ways of setting up our development environments. We will analyze the pros and cons of each to give you different options to choose from so that any errors will be consistent...