6 Ruby on Rails Video Tutorials

The tutorials are an intensive one-day overview of the fundamental concepts of the Ruby on Rails Web programming framework, presented by the UC Berkeley RAD Lab. The tutorials consists of six sections of approximately one hour each.

Who is the intended audience and what are the prerequisites?

You should be familiar with the basic programming concepts embodied in Java (OOP, class hierarchies, etc.) and be a reasonably experienced programmer in one or two languages (not necessarily Java). Very basic familiarity with relational databases is suggested, though we’ll do a quick review. Ditto familiarity with the basic structure of network-based applications.

1. Web Apps anatomy 101, Model-View-Controller 101, Rails 101, deconstructing Hello World in Rails.

2. Object orientation, naming conventions, mixins and modules (aka multiple inheritance done right), iterators and generators.

3. ActiveRecord, ActionController, ActionView: validation, model lifecycle, controller actions and the session, filters, forms and parameters, page layouts and partials, CSS.

4. Multi-table associations, embedding data structures, single-table inheritance… Controller tricks, View tricks, and testing: scaffolding, authentication, AJAX, Web services.

5. Deployment and Lifecycle Management: Automating deployment, schema migrations, configuration, debugging, benchmarking.

6. Configuration & deployment

Note: You can download Ruby on Rails here. Ruby on Rails is a popular open source web framework for Ruby language which is gaining quite some traction in the web development community. You can read the detailed documentation here.