Ruby on Rails Web Development

Course 1: Ruby on Rails: An Introduction
- Did you ever want to build a web application? Perhaps you even started down that path in a language like Java or C#, when you realized that there was so much “climbing the mountain” that you had to do? Maybe you have heard about web services being all the rage, but thought they were too complicated to integrate into your web application. Or maybe you wondered how deploying web applications to the cloud works, but there was too much to set up just to get going. In this course, we will explore how to build web applications with the Ruby on Rails web application framework, which is geared towards rapid prototyping. Yes, that means building quickly! At the conclusion of this course, you will be able to build a meaningful web application and deploy it to the “cloud” using a Heroku PaaS (Platform as a Service). Best of all, it will almost feel effortless… Really! “But wait”, you will say, “there is no way that we can build a useful application if there is no database involved. You need the data for an application to be useful.” Great point! But what if… instead of getting the data from the database, we get it from the internet by tapping into one of the web services out there that readily provides data needed by our application? “Ok, but that’s probably very complicated”, you will say. Take this course and you will be pleasantly surprised at just how easy it is!

Course 2: Rails with Active Record and Action Pack
- You already know how to build a basic web application with the Ruby on Rails framework. Perhaps, you have even taken Course 1, "Ruby on Rails: An Introduction" (we highly recommend it) where you relied on external web services to be your “data layer”. But in the back of your mind, you always knew that there would come a time when you would need to roll up your sleeves and learn SQL to be able to interact with your own relational database (RDBMS). But there is an easier way to get started with SQL using the Active Record Object/Relational (ORM) framework. In this course, we will be able to use the Ruby language and the Active Record ORM framework to automate interactions with the database to quickly build the application we want. In Rails with Active Record and Action Pack, we will explore how to interact with relational databases by using Active Record, a Ruby gem, which Rails uses by default for database access. We will then take a look at what role Active Record plays in the overall request-response cycle, when a client (the browser) requests data from the server, as well as how to submit the data to the server. Of course, when accessing data, security is of paramount importance! We will talk about vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, as well as how to secure access to data by authenticating and authorizing users accessing the data. Take this course to build a Ruby on Rails application with Active Record to automate the detailed SQL interactions with our database.

Course 3: Ruby on Rails Web Services and Integration with MongoDB
- In this course, we will explore MongoDB, a very popular NoSQL database and Web Services concepts and integrate them both with Ruby on Rails. MongoDB is a used to handle documents with a pre-defined schema which will give the developers an ability to store, process and use data using it’s rich API. The modules will go in-depth from installation to CRUD operations, aggregation, indexing, GridFS and various other topics where we continuously integrate MongoDB with RailsRuby. We will be covering the interface to MongoDB using the Mongo Ruby API and the Mongoid ORM framework (the MongoDB access counterpart to RDBMS/ActiveRecord within Rails). The last portion of the course will focus on Web Services with emphasis on REST, its architectural style and integration of Web Services with Rails. Core concepts of Web Services like request/response, filters, data representation (XML/JSON), web linking and best practices will covered in depth. This course is ideal for students and professionals who have some programming experience and a working knowledge of databases.

Course 4: HTML, CSS, and Javascript for Web Developers
- Do you realize that the only functionality of a web application that the user directly interacts with is through the web page? Implement it poorly and, to the user, the server-side becomes irrelevant! Today’s user expects a lot out of the web page: it has to load fast, expose the desired service, and be comfortable to view on all devices: from a desktop computers to tablets and mobile phones. In this course, we will learn the basic tools that every web page coder needs to know. We will start from the ground up by learning how to implement modern web pages with HTML and CSS. We will then advance to learning how to code our pages such that its components rearrange and resize themselves automatically based on the size of the user’s screen. You’ll be able to code up a web page that will be just as useful on a mobile phone as on a desktop computer. No “pinch and zoom” required! Last but certainly not least, we will get a thorough introduction to the most ubiquitous, popular, and incredibly powerful language of the web: Javascript. Using Javascript, you will be able to build a fully functional web application that utilizes Ajax to expose server-side functionality and data to the end user.

Course 5: Single Page Web Applications with AngularJS
- Do you want to write powerful, maintainable, and testable front end applications faster and with less code? Then consider joining this course to gain skills in one of the most popular Single Page Application (SPA) frameworks today, AngularJS. Developed and backed by Google, AngularJS is a very marketable skill to acquire. In this course, we will explore the core design of AngularJS 1.x (latest version of AngularJS 1), its components and code organization techniques. We will enhance the functionality of our web app by utilizing dependency injection to reuse existing services as well as write our own. We will create reusable HTML components that take advantage of AngularJS data binding as well as extend HTML syntax with a very powerful feature of AngularJS called directives. We’ll set up routing so our SPA can have multiple views. We will also learn how to unit test our functionality. At the end of this course, you will build a fully functional, well organized and tested web application using AngularJS and deploy it to the cloud.

Course 6: Capstone: Photo Tourist Web Application
- In this Capstone project for the Photo Tourist you will implement a Ruby on Rails web application that makes use of both a relational and NoSQL database for the backend and expose the data through services to the Internet using Web services and a responsive user interface operating in a browser from a desktop and mobile device. You will have a chance to revisit and apply what you have learned in our previous courses to build and deploy a fully functional web application to the cloud accessible to your co-workers, future employers, friends, and family. In developing the Photo Tourist web application, you will get to work with different data types and data access scenarios (e.g., fielded data display and update, image upload/download, text search, access controlled information) to provide your users the ability to show off their photos and information from trips they have taken and to seek out photos and information from trips taken by others. Using the application you develop, your users will be able to • Create an account • Upload and download photos to the site and make them accessible to others • Provide descriptions of trips and photos that others can read • Organize photos by location and trip, • Find photos based on location • Find photos based on text searches of descriptions • Locate the place where the photo was taken on a map