New Here?

So you're very new to Ruby? Good thing you found us!

We're going to take you on an ADVENTURE!

This project was started to provide puzzles for people pondering programming. We found that Ruby was pretty welcoming and provides some great tools to get started in web development. It's also a beautiful language :-)

We are using a tool called Sinatra for this exercise. It is, for our intents, effectively a stripped down version of Ruby on Rails

How do I get everything setup?

USE THE CLOUD HARRY!

This guide is written against using Cloud9 as it reduces barriers a lot lower than a local install. We've followed Ruby on Rails Tutorial (3rd Ed.) on this one.

Set up a Cloud9 Account: Cloud9 - Your development environment, in the cloud
On your dashboard CREATE A NEW WORKSPACE
Click on Clone from URL
Paste this url into the Source URL field: https://github.com/ZachBeta/ruby-newbie
Click Create
Prepare to rock!

Install stuff on your machine

If you are comfortable installing code on your own laptop. Follow the steps in this section to get a Ruby development environment running on your own machine. This is an alternative to using the Cloud9 service described in the previous section.

Install Ruby on Rails based on this guide: Install Rails | Your Guide for Installing Ruby on Rails
- We will not be using Rails right now, but the setup is VERY similar.
If you're new to GitHub we recommend using one of the links on the right hand side of this page: Download ZIP or download the zip here
Unzip into your favorite directory. We recommend a "workspace" directory in your home directory: ~/workspace
Open it in your editor of choice. If you don't have a preferred editor, we like to recommend Sublime Text to beginners.

How do I run it?

Each README will explain how to open and run the smaller applications.

Some Samples

Simple websites to explore Web Development with Ruby

Basics

Hello World
- sinatra_hello_world Hello World website in Sinatra
  - Get a basic sinatra webapp running
Reloading the server automatically
- sinatra_with_reload
  - Dynamically reload the page so you don't need to restart the app
Dates
- sinatra_friday "Is it friday yet?" website clone
  - Use some Ruby date functions in a sinatra site

HTML

HTML template tools
- sinatra_template Serve erb templates
  - Use erb templates with sinatra
CSS
- sinatra_bootstrap Serve erb templates with twitter bootstrap
  - Use erb templates with css and js assets
Forms
- sinatra_form
  - Handle simple form behavior with sinatra

Next Level

Using libraries
- sinatra_quotes
  - Use the i_heart_quotes gem to display a random "quote of the day" page
Hosting
- sinatra_hello_heroku
  - Deploy a simple sinatra app to a real web server

What if I run into issues?

File a github issue :-)

There's some very common issues people run into that I'll be updating in this README as they arise.

gwright / ruby-newbie