Welcome to the Ruby on Rails Back End Class!

Below is a quick outline of this course. Remember to keep pace with the
mentor groups, and don’t hesitate to ask lots of questions! Slack is the best place for your questions, and you have a Slack channel for the purpose. Get oriented on the Student Resources page. Sign up for mentor sessions on the Google sign-up sheet will will be sent out every Monday via Slack.

Course Calendar

The calendar below shows the start date of each week of the course and includes breaks and special events.

Course Sections

Week	Start	Due Date	Lessons
Pre-Class	03/09/22	03/15/22	Machine set-up
Pre-Class	03/09/22	03/15/22	Git-hub Cookbook
1	03/16/22	03/22/22	Lesson 1.1 SQL Basics
2	03/23/22	03/29/22	Lesson 1.2 More SQL, Introduction to Ruby
3	03/30/22	04/05/22	Lesson 2.1 Ruby Collections, Loops, and Conditional Statements
4	04/06/22	04/12/22	Lesson 2.2 Ruby Methods, Classes, and Blocks
5	04/13/22	04/19/22	Lesson 2.3 Ruby Test First Development
6	04/20/22	04/26/22	Lesson 3.1 Rails Basics
7	04/27/22	05/03/22	Lesson 3.2 Rails Active Record Associations
8	05/04/22	05/10/22	Lesson 4.1 Additional Rails Topics
9	05/11/22	05/17/22	Lesson 4.2 Rails Testing with RSpec
10	05/18/22	05/24/22	Lesson 4.3 Bringing it All Together
11	05/25/22	05/31/22	Lesson 4.4 Bootstrap 4 Basics; Bootstrap in Rails
12	06/01/22	06/07/22	Lesson 5.1 Building an API, Swagger ✔ Complete only sections 5.1.1 and 5.1.2 this week
13	06/08/22	06/14/22	Lesson 5.1 continued Building an API, Swagger ✔ Complete only section 5.1.3 this week
14	06/15/22	06/21/22	Lesson 5.2 Calling the API Using AJAX
15	06/22/22	06/28/22	Final Project work begins Mindset Curriculum Assignment
16	06/29/22	07/05/22	Final Project work continues Mindset Curriculum Assignment
17	07/06/22	07/12/22	Final Project work completed Mindset Curriculum Assignment
	07/13/22	07/15/22	Final Project Presentations Two nights, Time TBD
—	07/25/22	09/20/22	PRACTICUM

What You Will Be Learning

Rails is a widely used production grade web application framework. You will be learning to develop applications within that framework, which is based on the Ruby language. You will also learn some SQL, which is used by most back end frameworks to store and retrieve data. You will learn about

Basic SQL operations: Select, Insert Into, Update, Delete
Combining SQL table data using joins
Ruby syntax, variables, conditional statements, arrays, hashes, and loops
Ruby methods, classes, and blocks
Ruby test driven development
Rails simple applications using scaffolds
The Model/View/Controller organization of functions within Rails
Routes, and how you associate route URLs with controller methods
REST principles and operations: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
Communicating with the database using the ActiveRecord Object/Relational Mapping
How data models affect the structure of your controllers and views
Assocations between data models: one to many, many to many.
Views that show dynamic web pages with embedded Ruby
Diagnosing problems and debugging
Communicating messages to the user
Logging
Testing
Styling your application using the Bootstrap framework
How to build a back end API
How to enable the back end API for Swagger testing/documentation
How to call the API from Ajax

Before You Begin

Please set up your machines for Ruby and Rails development, as described Here.

Submitting Your Assignments

For each lesson, you will have one or several assignments. Each assignment is provided to you as a git repository, and a link will be provided to you for that git repository. You should have basic familiarity with git before starting this course, but if you aren’t confident in your git skills, see this Github Cookbook. For each assignment, you will do the following steps:

Fork the repository into your own git account. The fork should be public.
Clone your fork onto your workstation. Important: Clone your fork, not the original repository.
Create a branch for your lesson. Commit changes to that branch periodically, and push them to github.
When the lesson is complete and all your work has been pushed to github, open a pull request for your branch.
Then fill out your homework assignment submission form. Include a link to your pull request. (Be sure the link is for your pull request, not your github repository.) A mentor will then review your assignment, putting comments into the pull request.

Some of the git repositories will be used for several lessons. You should create a separate branch for each lesson. Each time you will create the new branch from the branch for the previous lesson, so that your work builds on previous steps.

When Submitting Your Code

When you submit your code, it should be working. If you are not able to get your code working, ask for help on Slack, or bring up questions in a mentor session, or ask for a special mentor session.

Ruby code should be readable. There are many aspects to good Ruby code style, but the most important for right now is indentation! The content of blocks, methods, and classes should be indented two spaces. The end statement should line up, being indented the same number of spaces, with the statement that begins the block, method, or class. Here’s an example:

def my_method(my_array,my_boolean)
  if my_boolean
    my_array.each do |entry|
      puts(entry)
    end
  else
    puts("The boolean was false.")
  end
end

We need proper indentation in order to be able to review your assignments. You need proper indentation to make sure your code is structured correctly.