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		Machine set-up
	Pre-Class		Git-hub Cookbook
1	08/11/21	08/17/21	Back End Lesson 1.1 SQL Basics
2	08/18/21	08/24/21	Back End Lesson 1.2 More SQL, Introduction to Ruby
3	08/25/21	08/31/21	Back End Lesson 2.1 Ruby Collections, Loops, and Conditional Statements
4	09/01/21	09/07/21	Back End Lesson 2.2 Ruby Methods, Classes, and Blocks
5	09/08/21	09/14/21	Back End Lesson 2.3 Ruby Test First Development
6	09/15/21	09/21/21	Back End Lesson 3.1 Rails Basics
7	09/22/21	09/28/21	Back End Lesson 3.2  Rails Active Record Associations
8	09/29/21	10/05/21	Back End Lesson 4.1 Additional Rails Topics
9	10/06/21	10/12/21	Back End Lesson 4.2 Rails Testing with RSpec
10	10/13/21	10/19/21	Back End Lesson 4.3 Bringing it All Together
	10/20/21	10/26/21	Catch Up week
11	10/27/21	11/02/21	Back End Lesson 4.4 Bootstrap 4 Basics; Bootstrap in Rails.
12	11/03/21	11/09/21	Back End Lesson 5.1 Building an API, Swagger
13	11/10/21	11/16/21	Back End Lesson 5.2 Calling the API Using AJAX
14	11/17/21	11/23/21	Final Project work begins
—	11/24/21	11/30/21	HOLIDAY – use this time to review/catch up
15	12/01/21	12/07/21	Final Project work continues
16	12/08/21	12/14/21	Final Project work completed
			FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATIONS!

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:

1. Fork the repository into your own git account. The fork should be public.
2. Clone your fork onto your workstation. Important: Clone your fork, not the original repository.
3. Create a branch for your lesson. Commit changes to that branch periodically, and push them to github.
4. When the lesson is complete and all your work has been pushed to github, open a pull request for your branch.
5. Then put a notification in Squibby, with a link to your pull request. This is how we know to review your assignment.

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.

Here is a video in which mentor John McGarvey takes you through the steps for submitting assignments: https://youtu.be/mGwVNoeeVoE .

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.