Learn Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails is an open source web development framework designed to get cleanly coded applications up and running with the minimum of time and the maximum of programmer happiness (and we’re not kidding, programmer happiness is one of Ruby’s official goals!). If you’re looking for a path into creating highly functional web apps with all the bells and whistles in the shortest possible time and with the least possible pain, learning Ruby on Rails is a very good choice.
Our Ruby on Rails tutorials start with a set of fundamentals, then move on to intermediate topics that will help you take basic Ruby skills to a more advanced level. The course aims to make learning Ruby on Rails swift, but the more advanced course materials will make sure that you understand everything a Rails pro needs. You can start a high-quality Ruby on Rails curriculum, starting right now.
Those who already have some experience with Ruby on Rails and want to expand and deepen their skill set can either start on the intermediate tutorials straight away or pick a specific topic, like the extremely popular Test-Driven Rails trail, and dive in.
Trails
Advanced ActiveRecord Querying
The ActiveRecord query interface is an impressive feat of engineering, but often we only use a small portion of it. In this trail we'll dive deep into ActiveRecord and learn how to build complex queries taking advantage of eager loading, sub-selects, ordering across joins, and more!
The ActiveRecord query interface is an impressive feat of engineering, but often we only use a small portion of it. In this trail we'll dive deep into ActiveRecord and learn how to build complex queries taking advantage of eager loading, sub-selects, ordering across joins, and more!
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Querying belongs_to Associations
Learn everything you need to work with your belongs_to relationships inside the database. Use joins, merge, and more to define concise, efficient queries that take full advantage of ActiveRecord's power.
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Querying belongs_to Associations Exercise
Put your new querying knowledge to the test with this exercise on querying belongs_to associations. Combine joins, merge, and the rest of tactics learned in the Querying belongs_to Associations video to lock in your new knowledge.
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Querying has_many Associations
Learn advanced techniques for querying your `has_many` associations, including a deep dive into the `joins` method and how to use `merge` to compose queries and keep them logically separated.
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Querying has_many Associations Exercise
Practice makes perfect, so dive into this exercise on querying has_many associations to lock in what you learned in the previous video. Use joins, distinct selects, and subqueries to query your has_many associations with ease.
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Querying with Custom Joins
In some cases ActiveRecord just can't figure out the query you need, so you'll need to write it yourself. Luckily, it's not an all or nothing proposition. In this video learn how to use custom joins to answer complex questions about your database that ActiveRecord can't do for you.
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Querying with Custom Joins Exercise
ActiveRecord can do a lot, but not everything. With this exercise, practice giving ActiveRecord a hand by writing custom SQL statements to define a join, all within the context of a larger ActiveRecord query.
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Querying with Aggregations
After watching this video you'll attain querying master status. With this last installment, Joe teaches how to do some counts, minimums, maximums, averages, and sums. We'll even see how to perform these aggregations after grouping rows according to certain criteria and how to filter based on the results of these calculations, all via the database.
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Querying with Aggregations Exercise
With this final exercise we'll bring everything together and even perform calculations and aggregations in the database. Complete this and you'll truly be a querying master.
Intermediate Ruby on Rails (Rails 5)
Dig deeper into Ruby on Rails. This series of video tutorials will help you move beyond the basics and start understanding and using more advanced Ruby- and creating better Ruby apps.
Dig deeper into Ruby on Rails. This series of video tutorials will help you move beyond the basics and start understanding and using more advanced Ruby- and creating better Ruby apps.
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2: CRUD, Validations, and Partials
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3: Polymorphic Associations
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4: File Uploads with Paperclip
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5: Rails Helpers
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6: Complex Associations
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7: Refactoring
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8: Advanced Refactoring
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9: Basic Search
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10: Advanced Search
Test-Driven Rails
Learn Test-Driven Rails Development using RSpec and Capybara in this series of tutorials. As part of the course, you can follow along with Josh as he lets his test drive through each of the steps needed to build out an application.
Learn Test-Driven Rails Development using RSpec and Capybara in this series of tutorials. As part of the course, you can follow along with Josh as he lets his test drive through each of the steps needed to build out an application.
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Setting Up the App and Initial Test
Time to write our first test! In this video, Josh discusses how to lay the foundation of a test suite within a Rails application, outlines the structure of an acceptance test, and writes an initial test ensuring we can interact with the application itself.
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Creating the First Todo
With an understanding of basic browser interactions, we're now equipped to dig deeper into the Todo application. We'll discuss new test assertions and how to interact with forms by creating a todo.
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Signing In and Todo Ownership
A list of todos is arguably valuable only when the list is owned by one person (or a group of people), but not everyone in the world. In this video, Josh introduces a simple User model and ensures that the todos created are assigned to the person who's "signed in."
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Refactor to User Model
We've gone over "Red, Green, Refactor", but haven't performed a larger refactor in the todo codebase. In this video, Josh refactors the controllers to isolate interaction of `session` and introduces a `User` class which mimics a basic authentication library.
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Completing a Todo
Managing a list of tasks to accomplish is great, but you know what's even cooler? Being able to mark things as done. In this video, Josh drives tracking completion of todos through acceptance and unit tests, and covers the intricacies of RESTful actions within the todo application.
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Refactoring Todo Completions
Tests are code too, and as such, they can be refactored during the "Refactor" step of "Red, Green, Refactor." In this video, Josh covers how to extract common interactions and assertions in the test suite (having introduced similar paths through todo creation, todo ownership, and todo completion).
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Marking Todos Incomplete
What happens when you incorrectly mark a todo complete? You mark it incomplete, of course! In this video, Josh introduces functionality to mark completed todos as incomplete, and refactors the controller to leverage a similar interface to marking a todo as complete.
The Weekly Iteration
Joshua Clayton and Chris Toomey
Rails makes many of our day to day tasks much easier, but sometimes this ease comes at a cost. Consistently across applications we see a lack of encapsulation and the shared global state of controllers and views to be one of the biggest sources of...
Chris Toomey
When all you have is the hammer of Rails, everything looks like a database backed dynamic site. But often we'd be much better served by a simple static site, and Middleman is a great choice for building these static sites. Join Chris as he shows...
Joel Quenneville and Derek Prior
Our languages give us great tools in the form of primitives: things like integers, strings, and arrays. However, over-relying on these leads to problems. This practice even has it's own fancy code smell name: Primitive Obsession. In this video,...
Joe Ferris
Ben and Joe continue to develop the Pastie application, demonstrating how to introduce authentication. We discuss how to retrofit existing components with unit tests, as well as the differences between authentication and authorization.
Derek Prior and Chris Toomey
Join Chris and Derek Prior (Development Director in thoughtbot's Boston office) to talk about Clearance, a great solution for email and password authentication. Just like Rails, Clearance is opinionated, and those opinions help make it more secure...
Derek Prior and Chris Toomey
Rails 5 is on the horizon and now's the perfect time to take a look at the features and changes coming with this major release. Derek Prior takes us on a tour of the changes, as well as showing us how to upgrade to the current Rails 5 beta.
Ben Orenstein
Ben offers a few concrete tips on landing a new (or better) Rails job.
Chris Toomey
Take a peek behind the scenes at some of features and workflows we've built up to help support Upcase as a production application and manage it across the varied environments of development, staging, and production.
Derek Prior and Joel Quenneville
The Rails console is a Rails developer’s best friend. On this week’s episode we take a look at some little-known tips and tricks for increasing your efficiency in the console.
Joe Ferris and Chris Toomey
Slow and redundant database queries got you down? Well have no fear! On this week's episode, Chris and Joe dive deep into the strategies you can use to optimize your queries and get your app back to ludicrous speed ASAP.
Chris Toomey and Melanie Gilman
On this week's episode, Chris is again joined by Melanie Gilman to discuss the amazing array of extensions added to Ruby by Rails' Active Support component.
Tute Costa and Chris Toomey
Join Tute Costa, the maintainer of thoughtbot's Paperclip gem, as he talks about how to be the best maintainer you can be, including how to quickly respond to issues and how to version your code.
Chris Toomey and Joel Quenneville
Rack is the glue that binds application frameworks like Rails and Sinatra to web servers like thin and puma. In this episode Joël Quenneville takes us on a tour of Rack and shows us how we can take advantage of the Rack pattern to build more...
Derek Prior and Chris Toomey
On this episode of the Weekly Iteration, Chris is again joined by Derek Prior, this time discussing building and extracting gems.
Chris Toomey and Joshua Clayton
On this week's episode, Chris is again joined by Josh Clayton, Boston Development Director and TDD master, this time to discuss the power of page objects for cleaning up feature specs.
Gabe Berke-Williams
Gabe joins Ben to discuss Apprentice.io. They discuss how to be a great mentor, how to help apprentices feel comfortable, and how (and why) to run an apprenticeship program at your company.
Joel Quenneville and Derek Prior
We've been writing Ruby for years on lots of different projects and in many different environments. This has led to thoughtbot's Ruby style to be somewhat different to the rest of the community's. In particular, we tend to focus on a sub-set of...
Joel Quenneville and German Velasco
Mutation-related bugs are some of the most common in the Ruby world. Joël and German explore many of the gotchas related to mutation, how to avoid them, and discuss when mutation might not be necessary at all.
Chris Toomey and Ben Orenstein
Recently, we ran a group-coding app-building contest for Upcase subscribers. In this video, Ben and Chris review each of the submissions, both highlighting great aspects and suggesting some areas for improvement. Live code review at its finest!
Chris Toomey and Ian C. Anderson
Keyword arguments allow us to write code that is both more expressive, and more flexible. Tune in as Ian and Chris dive into some of the more subtle aspects and demonstrate how we can use keyword args to produce clear, reliable code.
Joshua Clayton
This week, Chris is joined by thoughtbot's Development Director in Boston, Josh Clayton, to talk about factory_bot; a topic near and dear to Josh's heart, as he's been the maintainer of the project for over five years. FactoryBot is one of...
Joshua Clayton and Chris Toomey
On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Boston Development Director and TDD master Josh Clayton to discuss some of the tips we have here at thoughtbot for working with Heroku-deployed applications.
Chris Toomey and Derek Prior
On this week's episode, Chris is again joined by fellow bot Derek Prior, this time to discuss Turbolinks. Tune in to learn how to speed up your Rails apps, almost automatically!
Chris Toomey and Melanie Gilman
On this week's episode, Chris is joined by fellow thoughtbotter, Melanie Gilman, to discuss the wonder of Ruby's Enumerable and Comparable interfaces and how you can incorporate them into your own classes.
Ben Orenstein and Joe Ferris
In this episode, Ben and Joe discuss Sandi Metz's rules. You can read the summarized rules. Pull 1 Pull 2 Pull 3 Reek
Chris Toomey
On this week's episode, Chris takes us through everything we need to work with PDFs in our Rails apps: the easiest way to generate them, how to properly serve them as responses in our controllers, and even how to test them.
Joe Ferris and Gabe Berke-Williams
Joe and Gabe review form objects, and explain why they can almost always replace accepts_nested_attributes_for. See an example Rails app written with nested attributes and how and why we recommend switching to form objects. Nested Attributes...
Chris Toomey and Derek Prior
Database views are a great way to separate the complexities of database persistence from your application logic. Unfortunately Rails doesn't have built-in support for them, making them difficult to work with. Scenic, a new gem from thoughtbot,...
Joel Quenneville and Chris Toomey
If your application uses third-party APIs, it can be complicated to write good, flexible tests that don't depend on the service being present (or don't touch production data). In this Weekly Iteration, Joël Quenneville and Chris Toomey examine...
Chris Toomey and Derek Prior
On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Derek Prior to discuss Rspec's Bisect, a tool to track down order-dependence in your test suite and banish pesky intermittent test failures.
Joe Ferris
Ben joins Joe and build out the first feature in a Rails application, from scratch. Learn our process for jump-starting new applications using Suspenders. We'll also use our first integration test to help sketch out the first interactions in the...
Joel Quenneville and Ben Orenstein
Joël Quenneville presents the why, what, and how of testing in isolation!