Lev Lazinskiy

Coursera Rails Module 3 Notes

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

• Rails has only been around since 2004.
• Startups love Rails since it makes it easy to do rapid prototyping.
• MVC has been around since 1979

Useful Resources

• Learned about the Programmable Web API directory.
• Discovered the JSONView Browser Plugin which makes looking at JSON output in the web browser really nice.

Things I love about Rails

• Convention over Configuration. I love this, I love best practices, and I love having some guidelines to follow. Think less, do more.
• ORM makes it easy to swap out your DB as times goes on. Start dev in SQLite and should be able to seamlessly transition to MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.
• Rake = Ruby Make, comes with a ton of useful built in utilities. For instance if you want to see all of the routes that your application is aware of you can run rake routes.
• Helpers (or view helpers) are reusable macros that can be used across any of your views. This is much cleaner approach than themacros that I am used to working with in Flask. There are at on of useful helpers built into rails, like "cycle" which makes it super easy to make striped HTML tables.

Things I learned

General Rails Tooling

• Finally have a solid understanding of how Gems, Bundler, and Rbenv work together.
• Learned about and used the HTTParty Gem
• You can use a Pessimistic Version Constraint (Love the name) in your Gemfile which basically says do not go over a certain version. Essentially you are betting against the house and saying that you believe that an update to one of your gems is going to break everything sometime in the future. (Trust me this happens all of the time).

Testing with Rspec and Capybara

• Capybara - Acceptance Test Framework
• PhantomJS - Headless Browser
• Selenium - Browser Driver for Firefox/Chrome
• Poltergeist - PhantomJS Driver for Capybara

Debugging

Deploying To Heroku

Pro Tip

rails d $TYPE $NAME

rails g model recipeee

rails d model recipeee

Final Project