Course Organization and Tools

The tools that we’ll use

In this course, we’ll walk through the basics of getting Rails set up to use Webpacker in order to serve JavaScript and CSS to the browser. Then we’ll write code to make a basic browser-based e-commerce store. We’ll talk primarily about the following tools: Active Record, Active Resource, Action support, Action pack,JavaScript, webpack, and Webpacker, which will be the foundation of our application.

Course structure

This course is divided into three parts comprising of 24 chapters:

• Part I (Getting started with the basic rails): we’ll introduce both the Ruby language and the Rails framework

• Part II (Building an Application): we’ll create a web-based shopping cart application called Depot

• Part III (Rails in Depth): we’ll dig deeper into Rails. For the rest of the course, we’ll go through Rails topic by topic (which pretty much means module by module). We will have seen most of these modules in action before, but we’ll cover both what each module does and how to extend or even replace the module. The chapters in Part III cover all the major subsystems of Rails, including Active Record, Active Resource, Action Pack (including both Action Controller and Action View), and Active Support. This will be followed by an in-depth look at migrations

  Finally, we’ll delve into the interior of Rails and show how the components are put together, how they startup, and how they can be replaced. We’ll complete this course with a survey of a number of popular replacement parts, many of which can be used outside of Rails.

By the end of the course, we’ll have options for how to structure code for different levels of web-based application needs.

We have also included an appendix that has local installation instructions for all the tools used in this course.