Learn Rails 5.2: Accelerated Web Development with Ruby on Rails

438 Pages·2018·2.88 MB·English

by  Wintermeyer

Stefan Wintermeyer
Learn Rails 5.2
Accelerated Web Development with Ruby on Rails
Stefan Wintermeyer
Bochum, Germany
Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this
book is available to readers on GitHub via the book’s product page, located at
www.apress.com/9781484234884 . For more detailed information, please visit
www.apress.com/source-code .
ISBN 978-1-48423488-4 e-ISBN 978-1-4842-3489-1
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3489-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939414
© Stefan Wintermeyer 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting,
reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or
information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or
by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book. Rather than use
a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, logo, or
image we use the names, logos, and images only in an editorial fashion and to
the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the
trademark. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service
marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be
taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to
proprietary rights.
While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and
accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the
publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may
be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein.
the material contained herein.
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Für Oma und Opa.
I dedicate this book to my grandparents.
Preface
I write for developers who learn best by following short, clean examples. I don’t
like the idea of coding one big application over the course of a book; I much
prefer smaller, stand-alone code. Therefore, you can skip a couple of pages or
even complete chapters without losing context. On the other hand, I’ll frequently
be asking you to create another new Rails application.
A word of warning: I’m not going to sprinkle in CSS beauty anywhere.
Don’t let people fool you into believing that Ruby on Rails is easy to learn.
It’s not! It’s one of the best and most effective frameworks to develop web
applications, but it takes time to understand and master. The worst mistake of all
is to not learn Ruby before diving into Ruby on Rails. To avoid this, the book
starts with the basics of Ruby. You will not become a Ruby guru after reading it,
but you’ll understand the basic ideas, which is most important.
Newsletter and Updates
I publish a free Ruby on Rails e-mail newsletter that offers news and general
information about Rails. You can subscribe at
https://www.wintermeyer-consulting.de/newsletters/ .
Additionally, you can follow me on Twitter at
https://twitter.com/wintermeyer .
Consulting and Training
I provide Rails consulting and training anywhere in the world, on-site or remote.
If you are interested, please contact me by e-mail at sw@wintermeyer-
consulting.de .
Meetups and Conferences
Please don’t be shy if you’d like me to speak or offer a training session at your
local meetup or conference; send me an e-mail, and I’ll try to make it happen.
Feedback
Two things in particular highlight my work as an author: five-star Amazon
reviews and reader feedback offered by e-mail or Twitter. Please reach out and
reviews and reader feedback offered by e-mail or Twitter. Please reach out and
let me know what you thought of this book.
Have fun with Ruby on Rails!
—Stefan Wintermeyer
Introduction
This book requires basic knowledge of HTML, plus the reader (you, in other
words!) should have a basic understanding of programming. I’m not going to
teach you what variables are. I’m just using them. I work a lot with example
code and not so much with abstract definitions.
This is a technical book. Therefore, there are parts that are mind-
blowingly boring. But I try to keep them to a minimum.
Each chapter and most sections work autarkic. You don’t have to read the
book in order, and you can skip chapters if they are not important to you. All
code examples work without any dependencies on earlier chapters. I’m not going
to build a gigantic application to show how cool Rails is. I prefer the approach of
small projects to analyze and discuss specific topics.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Ruby Introduction
Ruby 2.5
Basics
Hello World
puts and print
Comments
Help via ri
irb
Ruby Is Object-Oriented
Methods
Classes
Basic Classes
Strings
Numbers
Boolean Values and nil
Variables
Naming Conventions
Scope of Variables
Methods Once Again
Method Chaining
Getters and Setters
Converting from One to the Other: Casting
Method to_s for Your Own Classes
Is + a Method?
if Condition
Shorthand
else
elsif
Loops
while and until
Blocks and Iterators
Arrays and Hashes
Arrays
Hashes
Range
Chapter 2: First Steps with Rails
Environment (Development)
SQLite3 Database
Why Is It All in English?
Static Content (HTML and Graphics Files)