Ruby Power and Light - Ruby on Rails Training and Consulting

Training

Get exactly the training you need, customized for your team and your projects!

Beginning to advanced Ruby and Rails training is available from RPL through half-day to five-day engagements. You can arrange for general training, or tie it in to a specific coached project. We'll talk beforehand to make sure your goals and your team's current skill level are taken into account, as we plan the best course of training for your needs.

You'll receive David A. Black's Ruby on Rails Training Manual, a 300-page book (different from David's other book, Ruby for Rails!) including hands-on exercises in Rails development and Ruby skills.

Call or email RPL for more information and a price estimate for the training you want!

Sample topics

Topics covered will depend on your goals, your team's current skills, and time engaged. This list will give you an idea of what's available. If there's a topic or skill you don't see here and would like covered, please ask!

  • Rails Fundamentals
    • Rails overview and walkthrough
    • The Model-View-Controller framework architecture
    • Creating a new Rails application
    • Rails request-handling and URL parsing
    • Development-mode deployment
    • Generating models and controllers
  • Basic Ruby Skills and Tools
    • Objects and methods
    • Scalars: strings, numbers, dates and times
    • Collections: arrays, hashes
    • Classes and modules
    • Control flow and conditionals
    • Interactive Ruby (IRB)
    • Attributes
    • Iterators
    • Exception and error-handling
  • Database Creation and Configuration
    • Basic MySQL creation commands
    • Configuring database.yml
    • Automatically-generated migrations
    • Custom migrations
  • Working with ActiveRecord
    • Modeling a domain
    • ActiveRecord models and Ruby classes
    • ActiveRecord associations
    • Writing Rails-friendly SQL
    • Data validation techniques
  • ActionView Essentials
    • RHTML templates
    • Embedded Ruby (ERb)
    • Partial templates
    • Built-in and custom helper methods
    • Layouts
  • Using ActionController
    • The session and flash facilities
    • Planning and writing actions
    • Controller/view communication via instance variables
    • The special params hash
    • Filter methods for specific actions
    • Redirecting actions
    • Explicit rendering commands
  • Working with Forms in Rails
    • ActionPack form helper methods
    • "Magic" form-field population
    • Processing forms
    • Hash-based batch processing of CGI data
  • Routing and REST
    • The routes.rb file
    • Simple route customization
    • Named routes
    • Resource mapping
    • Default REST action names
  • Session management and security
    • The session hash
    • Password deployment and encryption
    • Avoiding SQL injection
  • Deployment
    • Distributed deployment with Capistrano
    • Mongrel and mongrel_cluster
    • Load-balancing with Apache and nginx
  • Testing in Ruby and Rails
    • Ruby's Test/Unit framework
    • Writing fixtures
    • Unit tests
    • Functional tests
    • Integration tests
  • AJAX, JavaScript, and RJS
    • JavaScript facilities and support in Rails
    • Basic DOM updating with AJAX calls
    • RJS templates
    • Graceful degradation of AJAX
  • Reflective Rails
    • The Rails application console
    • Examining the Rails source code tree
    • The API docs