Ruby on Rails course for beginners by Code School

There are many online Ruby on Rails courses that train you on the basics, help you to develop your own applications, and show how to deploy them on a cloud platform. Taking an online course saves your time and money, and also enables you to learn new skills helping you to become a better developer.

Here are few courses we found to be suitable for beginners and those who are new to Ruby on Rails. We have limited the choice to full length courses, with focus on self learning with Videos, Code snippets and Live programming.

Learn Web Development with Rails (RailsTutorial.org by Michael Hartl)

Ruby on Rails Course by Railstutorial

URL: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

This is the second edition of Michael Hartl’s ‘Ruby on Rails Tutorial’ and comes in two main sections-

•  2nd edition of the book ‘Ruby on Rails Tutorials’ with over 600-page content
•  A series of explanatory screencasts running over 900 minutes

The main topics covered here are MVC, Git, CSS, Twitter Bootstrap, Ruby 1.9, Rails 3.2, TDD, BDD with Capybara and RSpec, deployment on Heroku, modeling users, sign up process, user micropost, following users, testing with Spork and Guard, and introduction to Cucumber and Gherkin.

You can read the book online absolutely free but they charge you USD 26 for the downloadable version. You can also opt for the combo bundle of PDF-screencast by paying USD 125. This further entitles you for few freebies like the copy of the 1st edition, screencasts for installation, advanced setup, and Sublime Text 2.

Rails for Zombies Redux and Rails for Zombies 2 (codeschool.com)

Ruby on Rails course by Code School

URL: http://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-ruby
http://www.codeschool.com/courses/rails-for-zombies-redux
http://www.codeschool.com/courses/rails-for-zombies-2

The three popular courses from Codeschool cover almost all the basic aspects related to Ruby and Ruby on Rails training with unique screencasts and exercises.

“Try Ruby” lets you to practice and understand Ruby core concepts and language API. There are no videos in this course.

“Zombies Redux” trains you on how to work with database in Rails by using CRUD, using ActiveRecord, MVC concepts, controllers, and directing requests to your apps.

“Zombies 2″ is an advanced course and takes you through the actual process of developing a Rails app, database migration and configuration, Ruby 1.9 hash syntax, bundler, REST, SCSS, Coffeescript, and RESTful routing.

You can opt for any of the courses depending upon your knowledge about programming and Ruby. Codeschool charges you a uniform fee of USD 25 per month in return to complete access to all its advanced courses. Being the basic ones, Codeschool offers the above three courses for free.

Ruby on Rails for Beginners (By Michael Hartl on Udemy.com)

Ruby on Rails for Beginners by Udemy

URL: http://www.udemy.com/ruby-on-rails-3/

Another great lecture-series by Michael Hartl, this course is spread over 75 lectures and more than 1140 minutes of content.

The basic topics you learn here are MVC, REST, Ruby, Rails, caching, performance, testing, deployment, data modelling, layout, user microposts, updating/ showing/ deleting users, sign up process, security, building a Rails 3 app, messaging, RSS, social features, search, and refactoring.

The course costs you USD 129 and you may also avail the benefits of guidance from an online instructor as and when required.

Rails 3 Tutorial Part I and II (by PeepCode.com)

Ruby on Rails 3 Course by Peep Code

URL: https://peepcode.com/products/meet-rails-3-i
https://peepcode.com/products/meet-rails-3-ii

The course comes in two parts. First part is very basic and includes a screencast summing up to 75 mins. The second part is a 90 mins video and takes you from basic to advanced concepts.

The first segment covers the basics of Ruby, Rails, directory organization, models, views, controllers, and Rails server. While the second one teaches about Git, helpers, model design and data, model relationship, REST, REST routing, and controllers.

You can enroll for one or both the parts by paying USD 12 for each part.

Riding Ruby on Rails (by tutsplus.com)

Ruby on Rails Course by Tutsplus

URL: https://tutsplus.com/course/riding-ruby-on-rails/

The course runs over 200 mins of video tutorials by Jose Mota and extensively covers Rails basics. It is divided into 4 different segments adding up to 18 chapters.

During the course, you will learn about Rails, model design and migration, model relationships, routing, asset pipeline, gemfile, validations, callbacks, view helpers, query interface, layouts, building resource scaffolds, email delivery through controllers, and content negotiation.

There are a couple of other courses on Tutplus which may be helpful -

• Fundamentals of Ruby – This course should be taken first                                        https://tutsplus.com/course/the-fundamentals-of-ruby/
• Test Driven Development – Must for any professional Ruby Programmer             https://tutsplus.com/course/test-driven-development-in-ruby/

To take up this course, you have to be a paid member of tutsplus.com. The membership fee is USD 19 per month/ USD 180 per year.

Ruby on Rails 3 Essential Training (by Lynda.com)

Ruby on Rails 3 for beginners by Lynda

URL: http://www.lynda.com/Ruby-on-Rails-3-tutorials/essential-training/55960-2.html

The 730 mins lecture series by Kevin Skoglund takes you through almost all the primary aspects of Ruby and Rails. The series is divided into 16 different segments with each one further divided into short video sessions.

By taking up the course, you will get to learn about Ruby, Rails 3, database, migration, ActiveRelation, ActiveRecord, MVC architecture, layouts, forms, gemfile, views, CRUD, REST, controllers, models, view helpers, debugging, bundler, partials and error handling.

To access the tutorials, you have to be a basic/ premium member of Lynda. They charge you USD 25 and USD 37.50 per month for basic and premium memberships respectively. In return, what you get is a full-fledged access to more than 1700 courses running over 97,000+ video tutorials. Premium members also get an added benefit of downloading project files for free.

Twitter Bootstrap has become the standard against which all Responsive frameworks are judged, and for a lot of good reasons. At the same time, there are excellent CSS frameworks like Zurb Foundation, LESS Framework etc. which offer features – be it components, code style, architecture, which can be more to one’s taste and development preference.

While we prefer Twitter Bootstrap, there are many more basic and advanced Web frameworks you can choose from depending on your need and interest.

Twitter Bootstrap

Bootstrap from Twitter for Responsive Web Development

URL: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

 Technical Details

• Type: Framework
• Technology: HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, jQuery
• Compatible with: Firefox- 5,6+ ; Safari 5+ ; Chrome 14+ ; Opera 11+; IE- 7,8,9+
• Additional Components: Modal, Alert, Button groups, Dropdowns, Badges, Navbar, Tooltips, Labels, Progressbar, Typeahead, Thumbnails, Popovers, Accordion, JS plugins

Quick Summary

• 12- column grid structure
• Fixed (comes with an option of responsive design) and Fluid layout pattern
• Designs pages fit for displays ranging between 480px (or even less) and 1200px (or even more)
• Nested grids, Offset support
• Customizable features for typography, colors, navbar, grid and more
• Based on LESS CSS Pre-processor

Zurb Foundation

Foundation from Zurb for Responsive Web Design & Development

URL: http://foundation.zurb.com/

Technical Details

• Type: Framework
• Technology: HTML5, CSS3, Javascript
• Compatible with: Chrome; Safari; Firefox; IE- 8,9+; iOS- for iPhone, iPad; Windows Phone 7, Android 2+ for tablet and phone
• Additional components: Media Queries, Buttons, Modular Scale for Typography, Forms, Navigation, Tabs, Alerts, Tooltips, Labels, Accordion, Tables, Progress Bars, Video, Thumbnails, Orbit, Magellan, Reveal, Joyride, Clearing, UI elements

Quick Summary

• 12-column grid structure
• Fluid layout pattern
• Default grid-width set at 940px, adjustable grid-size, single breakpoint at 768px for devices that need width less than 768px
• Nested grids, Offset support
• Customizable features for typography, forms, UI elements, navigation etc
• Based on Sass styling pattern

LESS framework

LESS CSS Responsive Web Framework

URL: http://lessframework.com/

Technical Details

• Type: Grid System
• Technology: HTML5, CSS, Javascript
• Compatible with: IE 6+; Safari; Chrome; Opera; Firefox; Nokia Webkit; Android Webkit; Mobile Safari (all iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches); WebOS, Blackberry OS
• Additional Components: You need to add them separately

Quick Summary

• 3/ 5/ 8/ 10 columns grid structure
• Fluid layout pattern
• Default grid-width set at 992 px; adjustable for 320, 480, and 768px
• 3 sets of typography presets
• Default layout served to browsers not supporting media queries; other layouts served for the ones that do
• Based on LESS CSS Pre-processor

 Skeleton

Skeleton Boilerplate for Responsive CSS code

URL: http://www.getskeleton.com/

Technical Details

• Type: Boilerplate
• Technology: CSS
• Compatible with: Chrome; Firefox 3 and above; Safari; IE- 7,8,9
• Additional Components: Buttons, Forms, Media Queries, Typography

Quick Summary

• 16-column grid structure
• It’s only a development kit and not a full-fledge UI framework
• Default width set at 960px; can design pages for width ranging from 480px (or even less) to 960px
• Support for iPhone Retina images and Droid (charge/ original)
• Grid pattern is a variation of 960gs

Gumby

URL: http://www.gumbyframework.com/

Technical Details

• Type: Framework
• Technology: HTML, CSS, Javascript
• Compatible with: all the commonly-used browsers and screen-sizes
• Additional Components: Design templates, UI kit, Production-ready codes, Buttons, Forms, Toggles, Navigation, Drawers, Tabs

Quick Summary

• 12/ 16/ hybrid columns grid structure
• 12-column grid divided into 60px-wide portion, 16-column into 40px-wide
• Fixed, fluid layout pattern
• Grid based on 960gs
• Nested grids
• Customizable features for grid, typography, colors etc

Columnal

Columnal Grid System for Responsive CSS Design

URL: http://www.columnal.com/

Technical Details

• Type: Grid System
• Technology: CSS
• Compatible with: all the commonly-used desktop and mobile browsers
• Additional components: Media Queries, Sub-columns, Prefix, Suffix, Wireframing templates, PDF of grid system

Quick Summary

• 12-column grid structure
• Default width of 1140px; IE- 6,7 work well on 984px or 960px
• Fluid layout
• Borrowed from 960.gs, cssgrid.net grid systems

1140 Grid

1140 Grid System for Responsive Web Design

URL: http://cssgrid.net/

Technical Details

• Type: Grid System
• Technology: CSS
• Compatible with: IE- 6,7,8+; Safari; Chrome; Firefox; MacBook, iMac, iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Blackberry OS, Nokia phones (the old ones too)
• Additional components: Media Queries

Quick Summary

• 12-column grid structure
• Default width of 1140px
• Fluid layout
• Option of including Retina Display x2 images for iPhone 4

Semantic Grid System

Semantic Grid System for Responsive CSS Web Design

URL- http://semantic.gs/

Technical Details

• Type: Grid System
• Technology: CSS
• Compatible with: IE 6+ ; Firefox 3.5+; Chrome; Opera 9+, Safari 4+
• Additional components: Mixins for LESS, Stylus, and SCSS

Quick Summary

• 12-column grid structure
• Default width of 960px
• Fixed, fluid layout
• Nested columns
• Runs on LESS, Stylus, SCSS pre-processor

Golden Grid System

Golden Grid for Responsive Grid System

URL: http://goldengridsystem.com/

Technical Details

• Type: Grid System
• Technology: HTML, CSS3, Javascript
• Compatible with: IE 6+; Safari; other common browsers and screen-sizes
• Additional components: Media queries, Zoomable baseline grid, Golden Gridlet

Quick Summary

• 18-column grid structure of which 16 columns available for actual design
• Foldable grid pattern inspired by DIN paper system and Unigrid
• Covers screens ranging from 240px to 2560px
• Columns can be folded into 8 or 4 numbers depending upon the screen size
• Elastic gutters for better layout pattern

Titan Framework

Titan CSS Framework for Responsive Web Design

URL: http://titanthemes.com/titan-framework-a-css-framework-for-responsive-web-designs

Technical Details

• Type: Framework
• Technology: CSS
• Compatible with: Still in developmental phase
• Additional components: PSD templates, reset.css, 12.css, text.css, 16.css

Quick Summary

• 12/ 16 column grid structure
• Similar to 960.gs grid system classes
• Default width set at 960px

Responsive Grid System

Responsive Grid System

URL: http://www.responsivegridsystem.com/

Technical Details

• Type: Grid System
• Technology: HTML, CSS
• Compatible with: IE 6+; Safari 4+; Opera 9+; Firefox 3.5+; Chrome
• Additional Components: Media Queries

Quick Summary

• 2 to 12 columns grid structure
• Suitable for all the commonly-used widths including those less than 480px
• Fluid layout

Base

Base CSS Responsive Framework

URL: http://matthewhartman.github.com/base/

Technical Details

• Type: Framework
• Technology: HTML5, CSS, Javascript
• Compatible with: IE 7 and above; Firefox; Chrome; Opera
• Additional components: PSD, HTML5 template and jQuery, Typography, Tables, Blockquotes, Javascript plugins, Forms, Buttons, Lists

Quick Summary

• 12-column grid structure
• Fluid layout
• Based on LESS CSS Pre-processor
• Default font-size of 14px, line-height of 22px
• Built for mobile, netbook, tablet, desktop

Kube

Kube CSS Framework

URL: http://imperavi.com/kube/

Technical Details

• Type: Framework
• Technology: CSS, Javascript
• Compatible with: Chrome; Opera; Safari; IE 8+; Firefox
• Additional components: Typography, Tables, Forms, Buttons, Blockquotes, Lists, Figure, Definition

Quick Summary

• Nested columns
• Developer version is based on LESS and includes mixins, modules, and variables
• Includes a few goodies like Lead, Links, Colours, Elements, and Images

CSS Horus

CSS Hórus Framework for responsive designs

URL: http://csshor.us/

Technical Details

• Type: Framework
• Technology: CSS
• Compatible with: IE 7, 8, 9+; Safari; Chrome; Firefox; Opera; iPhone, iPad; Blackberry; Windows phone; Android; Nokia
• Additional components: Resets, Table, Lists, Button, Links, Typography, Forms, Basics, RTL

Quick Summary

• 16-column grid structure
• Available width-size of 1200px, 960px, and less
• Based on LESS CSS Pre-processor
• Also compatible with screen-width of mobile phones

Amazium

Amazium CSS Framework

URL: http://www.amazium.co.uk/

Technical Details

• Type: Framework
• Technology: HTML, CSS
• Compatible with: all the commonly-used browsers and screen-sizes
• Additional Components: Typography defaults, Tables, Media Queries, Forms, provision for responsive images and videos, Show and Hide, Forms, Tables

Quick Summary

• 12-column grid structure
• Fluid layout
• Default grid-width set at 960px; can design pages for width ranging between 300px and 1200px
• Supports Hi-resolution / Retina (Pixel ratio:2) images
• Offset support

Apart from core hosting, Heroku provides many of the advance features like Auto Scaling, Deployment Stacks, HTTP caching etc. The partner eco-system with add-ons like New Relic Performance Monitoring, Redis and Mongo NoSQL databases, SMS Gateways, Billing Gateways add powerful functionality to Web Applications easily.

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object relation database system. PostgreSQL is supported by most modern programming languages – including Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala, Go, Tcl, C/C++, Java, .Net, and Javascript. It also provides high level of security, reliability and data integrity compared to other open source offerings. And did we mention it is our favorite?

Heroku platform uses PostgreSQL as core database since 2007 for all Applications hosted on it. This service gives option to use Heroku database service by Applications hosted on any other cloud platform like Amazon or Rackspace. In announcing Heroku PostgreSQL as a database service suddenly makes Heroku as a significant competitor to Amazon RDS, Database.com and Azure. Its no more a closed Ruby shop.

According to Heroku “Heroku PostgreSQL creates multiple, geographically distributed copies of all data changes as they are written. These copies are constantly checked for consistency and corruption. If a meteor were to wipe out the east coast, you won’t lose your data.”

Setting up Heroku PostgreSQL database is three simple step process

• Register or sign-in with your Heroku account
• Navigate the database dashboard and click the “+” in the Your Database header. Choose your choice of plan and thus database would be created in next 3-5 minutes.
• Once your database is available click on it to view details. The connection setting section contains all the required information like user-name, password, host, database name and port which can be used to connect the database using any PostgreSQL compatible client.

Heroku database as a service comes with many different plans ranging from $200/month plan with 1.7GB cache to $6,400/month with 68GB cache.
More details about pricing can be checked here http://postgres.heroku.com/pricing

More information can be found on Heroku’s site
http://postgres.heroku.com/

While there are a lot of other Ruby on Rails Hosting options, Engine Yard stood out for us with its support, documentation and control over the cloud infrastructure. Managing Cloud architecture, managing, monitoring and specifically scaling them has been as easy as one could imagine.

It is a great comfort in knowing that your Hosting partner understands the Application Stack  better than you do. With that, we are glad that we signed up to be a Partner for Engine Yard.

About Engine Yard

Engine Yard is the leading development and deployment platform for the cloud. With a unique combination of Ruby on Rails expertise, operations automation, open source community involvement, and world-class service, Engine Yard empowers businesses to build and run cloud-based applications easily and cost-effectively. More than 1,800 customers, from explosive-growth Web startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, trust Engine Yard for fast deployment, rapid scaling, high performance, and 24×7 uptime, allowing them to leverage Rails agility for competitive advantage. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Engine Yard is backed by Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com.

This is a presentation given by Praveen Wicliff at one such Startup events, Startup Saturday, Mumbai. Event itself is focused on Cloud Computing and SaaS, where different startups have presented their ideas and products. Simone Brunozzi from Amazon Web Services (AWS) has presented how Startups can use AWS and promised some free Amazon credits. Yay!

So, it was a mixed feeling when Heroku has announced that they have been taken over by Salesforce, the SaaS CRM provider. It is great to see Ruby and Ruby on Rails getting to the next level, playing strong against industry heavy weights like Dot Net and Java. Its great to see how a truly useful product like Heroku, that too on infrastructure side, gets recognition and reward within three years of inception.

Salesforce is a big player in SaaS and now focussing on Cloud, and they surely know how to sell to enterprises. They are the original SaaS company which managed to change perception of software licensing and usage patterns. While Salesforce still have issues in selling Force.com platform to developers, I would not count out their marketing strength and new focus, given that they have launched Database.com in the same week as this take over announcement.

All this is good. The concern really about the kind of technological innovation and marketing focus Heroku will have now. Salesforce is seen more as a marketing innovator rather than technical innovator. Unlike Heroku, which is completely an open platform, Salesforce initial attempt at PaaS with Force.com locks developers and their applications on Salesforce platform.

Heroku focus entirely has been on Ruby on Rails while Salesforce has focused on Java and their own version of Java, Apex. Heroku team assures that they will be still focusing on same vision they started with, next year is going to prove this one way or the other.

One really bright spot has been about Ruby, there is a growing recognition that Ruby language’s inherent strengths are suited for the agile development and cloud infrastructure. In the words of CEO of Salesforce – “Ruby is the language of Cloud”, we gladly agree.

Like the dashboard on a car tells the driver the current state of the car’s operations: current speed, current amount of gas in the tank, etc, the digital dashboard tells a business owner, the current state of his business.

Understanding the potential of the dMine Franchise Dashboards product and Business Dashboards help you monitor the current status of your business, Shambhavi Anand from SME Franchise India has interviewed Sanjay Patel, Director of dMine Business Dashboards products and the benefits that the product brings to the table.

Here is the snapshot of the interview on Franchise Dashboards

What is a business dashboard

A business dashboard or a digital dashboard is the visual display of important data needed to achieve one or more objectives of a business, consolidated and arranged on a single screen, so that they can be easily monitored.

The dashboard can give you the summary of different arrears & industries which are important for you to monitor like, finance, sales & marketing, telecom, hospitality, construction, port, automobile, retail, pharmacy and airlines.

“It helps an organisation achieve its goals by monitoring it’s performance against it’s objectives. Used and deployed correctly, a dashboard can align an organisation or team, focusing everyone’s efforts on common goals and ensuring visibility of performance and allow tracking of the organisations key performance indicators (KPI’s),” says Sanjay Patel, Director, dMine Business Dashboard.

How does it help in business?

A Dashboard will allow you to create, monitor, collaborate and schedule Dashboards for Analytics, Organisational KPIs, balanced scorecards, sales dashboards, performance management, service monitoring consoles, operational metrics and MIS.

It enables organisations to monitor their business performances closely with industry standard metrics and benchmarks. According to Mr Patel, dashboards can be used in any businesses be it manufacturing, retail, insurance, banking / finance, media and entertainment irrespective. For example, in the manufacturing industry, decisions may focus on resource allocation optimization and waste reduction, as supported by the Lean Manufacturing Methodology.

He adds, “For small businesses, it is important to solve business problems at a price that makes sense. Beauty of the Dashboard solutions is, it can start small and grow big in your implementation does not require traditional way of deploying heavy and costly Business Intelligence tools. Hence it perfectly suits well for the SMEs / SMBs also all this at an affordable price.”

Advantages of using a dashboard:

• The data can be displayed in the format you prefer. You have all the choices you want tabular, graph, pie chart, single metrics, graphical trend analysis, capacity gauges, geographical maps, percentage share, stoplights etc.
• The biggest advantage of a dashboard is effective sharing and communication of information which leads to effective monitoring of business operations and facilitates better decision-making process.
• Another advantage of an executive dashboard that technology team will not have to make any extra effort to incorporate this application. The dashboard can run on any compatible browser with adobe flash installed. Some of the recent dashboard products use latest technology to get the best results and this increases the costs of these products. But there are many which use open source technologies as well as rely on existing technology infrastructure of the customers and thus help in reducing the investment costs for customers.
• It is an easy to use technology. There is no need for you to learn any new application. All you need to know is how to click. Dashboards use Rich Internet Application UI and have features like drag and drop.

Where does the data displayed on a dashboard come from?

The data shown in the Dashboards may come from multiple data sources of the various applications being used in an organization. Most of the organizations use systems to capture and store business information while some organizations also use plain vanilla spreadsheets.

Most Dashboard tools run on a read-only mode and prefer storing data in a secure data source so that this data cannot be altered or tampered.

Another important question is whether you can access the data on your dashboard through emails and smart phones? Mr patel says that There have been innovations happening on this front, Business Dashboard tools like dMine have the capability of exporting the Dashboards and charts into PDF formats which is interactive so there are mouse over and mouse click events on the PDF file, thus retaining the experience of the browser even in the PDF file. This PDF file can be sent as an attachment in emails with the graphs and data bundled.

For more details on dMine Business Dashboard Software kindly refer to www.dminedashboards.com

Mumbai, September 10th, 2009

9.9 Media, in association with IBM and Icicle Technologies, hosted an evening event on 10th September 2009, titled “Making the Right Business Decisions” for senior and top managers (including CEOs, CFOs and CIOs) to examine ways to leverage enterprise information for maximum benefit.

The event began at around 6.30 pm with eminent speakers from various industry segments speaking on the importance of Information and how Business Intelligence could help organizations improve performance by creating and monitoring key performance indicators. Around 90 delegates from reputed organizations attended the event and contributed to its success.

Mr. Sanjay Patel, Director, Icicle Technologies spoke on the occasion and emphasized on the need of Business Intelligence Dashboard tools for measuring and monitoring organizational performance. The dMine Dashboard product was demonstrated at the event and got a tremendous response from the delegates.

About dMine Dashboards

dMine Dashboard allows the business users to create, monitor, collaborate and schedule Dashboards for Analytics, Organizational KPIs, Balanced Scorecards, Sales Dashboards, Performance Management, Service Monitoring Consoles, Operational Metrics and MIS.

dMine Dashboards from Icicle Technologies enables organizations to monitor their business performances closely with industry standard metrics and benchmarks. dMine is extensively used across different domains like Manufacturing, IT, Retail, Finance, Media etc.