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

If there is Ruby magic, there is Rails magic

By this point, you’re probably familiar with what is fondly referred to as Ruby magic. We saw some examples where Ruby “magically” generates output out of syntax that simply makes sense, but we didn’t know exactly how it’s done (hint: meta-programming). In the same fashion, Ruby on Rails (also known as Rails or simply RoR) internally uses meta-programming to generate functionality that is not explicitly for our eyes to see. We’ll understand it by looking at more examples, but first, we need to install Ruby on Rails.

Installing Ruby on Rails

Just like the libraries we’ve seen so far, Rails is an open source gem. It behaves a little differently than the gems we’ve seen so far as it uses many dependencies and can generate code examples, but at the end of the day, it’s still a gem. This means that we can either install it by itself, or we can include it in a Gemfile. For this...