Course Outline

The following is a series of articles I worked on in mid 2011, meant to provide a guide for someone new to web development that wished to start with Ruby on Rails. As a whole the course is incomplete, but some of the articles still could provide value to those who stumble upon them. If you wish to use the articles to help yourself get started, feel free to use my contact page to let me know. I’m willing to clean these up a bit, and finish the course with your help, if I know that you wish to use them.

The course was not intended to provide instruction on HTML, CSS, or Javascript. I expect that you can purchase books on these subjects, or even refer to W3Schools links I’ve just provided to learn more about those languages. HTML and CSS are definitely needed as prerequisites to working with Ruby on Rails. HTML is easy enough to learn. CSS just takes a little bit of experience and time to pick up and work with fluently. I’m still learning Javascript, even though I have a working knowledge of it, so it’s not a total requirement to jump into the world of web development.

It might be a bit simpler to start people out with a server side language such as PHP, but I’m interested in helping people dive right into a website development framework (Rails) that is based on an even more flexible and beautiful language known as Ruby.

The course provided by this site provides an explanation of the concepts which experienced web developers are already aware of, and thus provide the prerequisite material needed for a person to jump into a book on Ruby on Rails without being completely lost. In the case of this site, the articles are intended to serve as the prerequisite for the Rails 3 In Action book by Ryan Bigg and Yehuda Katz, which are available in print or ebook versions.