Coursera Rails Module 3 Notes

| ruby | programming | learning |

I just finished the final module of this course. Overall I think it was a great course that provided a good overview of Ruby, and a thorough introduction to Rails. The next course dives into working with Databases and I am looking forward to learning more about Active Record.

Some Interesting Facts

Useful Resources

The lectures had a bunch of useful tools sprinkled throughout.

Things I love about Rails

Things I learned

General Rails Tooling

Testing with Rspec and Capybara

Once again, I cannot say how happy I am that this course dives right into all sorts of testing. Kudos to the JHU team for thinking about this important skill even in an introductory course. This module talked about doing acceptance testing with Capybara. We learned about:

Debugging

The built in debugging tools in development mode in rails are just awesome. You get an IRB console inside of the browser, this is super useful for debugging purposes. The gems that are responsible for this functionality are byebug and web-console.

Deploying To Heroku

The course walked us through how to deploy an app to Heroku. Super simple of course. It is really nice to be able to see your application out in the wild!

Pro Tip

The rails generator makes it super easy to create all of the files that you may need for a controller or model. However if you accidentally create a model with the wrong name and your project it huge it can be somewhat daunting to figure out what is safe to remove. You can reverse a rails generated command with:
rails d $TYPE $NAME
So for example, if I created a model called recipeee
rails g model recipeee
I could remove it with
rails d model recipeee
I can see how this will come in handy in the future.

Final Project

The final project is a simple web application called Recipe Finder that allows you to search for recipes using the food2fork api. I cleaned it up a bit and added an actual search bar (the assignment just had you add query params).

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