Ruby on Rails training: Advanced Ruby on Rails

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Course Number: 671
Duration: 4 days
view class outline

Advanced Ruby on Rails Training Overview

This advanced Ruby on Rails course is for developers who know their way around the basics of Ruby and Rails (as reflected in our Introduction to Ruby on Rails course) and want to take their skills and understanding of Ruby and Rails to the next level.

The course explores vital Rails subsystems and facilities: routing and REST support, caching, plugins, deployment, and more. Basic Rails areas, like associations and templating, get an expert-level treatment. And the Ruby language comes alive through in-depth examination of Ruby's object model, important components like regular expressions and file I/O, and the dynamic behavior of Ruby methods and functions that makes Rails tick.

Location and Pricing

Most Accelebrate courses are taught on-site at our clients' locations worldwide for groups of 3 or more attendees and are customized to their specific needs. Please visit our client list to see organizations for whom we have recently delivered training. These courses can also be delivered as live, private online classes for groups that are geographically dispersed or wish to save on the instructor's or students' travel expenses. To receive a customized proposal and price quote private training at your site or online, please contact us.

In addition, some courses are available as live, online classes for individuals. To see a schedule of online courses, please visit http://www.accelebrate.com/online_training/xml_html_js.htm.

Advanced Ruby on Rails Training Prerequisites

All Ruby on Rails training attendees should have some experience with server-side web development. Programming experience in an object-oriented language would also be helpful.

Hands-on/Lecture Ratio

This course is a fast-paced, hands-on workshop, with the bulk of class time spent developing Ruby on Rails applications in consultation with a seasoned instructor.

Advanced Ruby on Rails Training Materials

All students receive a copy of Hacking with RUBY: Ruby and Rails for the Real World and related course materials.

Software Needed on Each Student PC

The Ruby interpreter version 1.8.6 or later.
The Rails framework 2.0.0 or later.
SQLite3 and MySQL databases (http://dev.mysql.com) works immediately with Rails, but many others have supported adapters (DB2, Oracle, and Postgres among them).
A plain text editor, preferably one that understands the syntax of Ruby and Rails.

Note: We would be delighted to customize the platform of this class to match what you are running in production.

Advanced Ruby on Rails Training Objectives

Understand Ruby's object model and dynamism in depth
Go beyond the basics in fundamental Rails areas
Understand the REST support that has transformed Rails
Learn current state-of-the-art deployment strategies and tools
Test Rails code with built-in and third-party tools
Learn how to extend Rails applications, and Rails itself, with plugins and custom code

Advanced Ruby on Rails Training Outline

The Ruby language: beyond the basics

Modules vs. classes

Inheritance
Including and extending with modules
Class/module nesting
Class and module (re)opening

Method lookup rules
Singleton methods and classes
Variable types and scope differences

local
instance
class
global

Constant scoping, lookup, and assignment
Built-in classes:

Regexp
Range
File
Numericals: Fixnum, Bignum, Float
Date and time arithmetic

Hooks and callbacks

method_missing
inherited and included

Executable objects

Methods
Blocks, Procs, procs, and lambdas
Closures

Routing and REST

URL recognition and generation
Custom routes
Named routes
Using routes in controllers and views
map.resources
Nested resources
HTTP request methods
_url and _path named routes
Redefining id's with to_param

ActiveRecord techniques, tweaks, and optimizations

Single-table inheritance
Associations:

Non-default naming
Overriding defaults (foreign_key, class_name)
Polymorphic associations
Embellishing associations with methods
Building associations

Using plain attributes
Overriding setter methods
White/black-listing columns for assignment
Eager loading
select and other find delimiters
Queries with raw SQL
Collection proxies and laziness
Scoping

Deployment

Simple deployment with Mongrel and WEBrick
Full deployment control with Capistrano
Version control
Mongrel and Mongrel clusters
Proxying from Apache and nginx
Issues in deployment

Testing

Integration testing
Acceptance testing with Selenium
Continuous feedback with autotest
AJAX testing and troubleshooting

Caching

View caching:

page
action
fragment

Database query caching

Plugins

Plugin engineering
Generating and writing plugins
Survey of selected plugins

acts_as_authenticated
assert_accessible
annotate_models
Routing Navigator

Plugins vs. ad hoc library code

Exploring and extending the Rails source code

Basic layout of libraries
The "ClassMethods" trick
Modifying and hooking into source code
alias_method_chain
field_error_proc
Writing ad hoc initialization code

ActiveSupport extensions to Ruby

String extensions
Date and time calculations
HashWithIndifferentAccess
OrderedHash
to_xml and other conversion extensions
Pluralization and other Inflector function

Rails citizenship

Following edge Rails
Bug tracking
Writing and submitting patches
Public forums

Conclusion