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, 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
• Fill in Workspace name with ruby-newbie
• Fill in Clone from Git or Mercurial URL with https://github.com/ZachBeta/ruby-newbie
• Click the Custom project
• Click Create
• Click on the ruby-newbie project that shows up in the left sidebar.

You should now see directory structure on the left with various projects such as hello_world and bootstrap. You can explore the projects by clicking on the various files and directories. For more information see the individual project sections below.

...Or install stuff on your machine

If you do not want to use Cloud9 and 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 a strong alternative to using the Cloud9 service described in the previous section, but will take a lot more setup time.

• 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?

Let's run our simplest example hello_world :D

• Install libraries
  • Type into the terminal: bundle
  • Ruby uses libraries. A library is a packages of other people's code that helps you do common things you want to do. One specific one we'll use is sinatra, which can help you make your ruby code talk to a browser like Chrome.
• Open the code:
  • Open the folder hello_world in the folder list on the left
  • Open hello_world.rb from there, and it will open in your editor pane.
• Run the code!
  • hello_world.rb will has instructions at the top of the file explaining how to run it; we'll explain that here too.
  • Our instructions
  • From your terminal run: cd hello_world to get your terminal into the correct directory. If you type pwd and it tells you something that contains hello_world/, you're in!
  • From your terminal copy and paste this line:ruby hello_world.rb -p $PORT -o $IP (if you're using something other than Cloud9, run ruby hello_world.rb instead)
  • The terminal pane running the server will behave differently from how the terminal did before
    • it will list out a lot of information telling you what the server is doing
    • when you want to shut down the server go to your terminal and press ctrl and c (on all platforms). In the context of a terminal this is not copy like you may be used to, it stands for close.
• Look! You created a website! View the website
  • If you're using Cloud9 there will be a link shown that you can click. (If you're using something other than Cloud9, you can go to http://localhost:4567 in your browser)
  • Now you can send it to your Mom!
• You can then navigate your terminal back to the main directory with: cd .. will go up one directory, or cd ~/workspace which will go to your personal workspace directory.
• Now you can follow the same pattern for each of the other micro apps.
• Each app will also have some challenges to give you an idea of how you can change or improve the app and improve your familiarity with it.

The Micro Apps

Simple web apps to explore web development with Ruby:

Basic MicroApps

• Hello World
  • hello_world Hello World website in Sinatra
  • Get a basic sinatra webapp running
• HTML template tools
  • template Serve erb templates
  • Use erb templates with sinatra
• CSS
  • bootstrap Serve erb templates with twitter bootstrap
  • Use erb templates with css and js assets
• Forms
  • form
  • Handle simple form behavior with sinatra
• Using libraries
  • sentence_diff
  • Use a library to calculate a diff between two strings of text

Intermediate

• Hosting
  • hello_heroku
  • Deploy a simple sinatra app to a real web server
• CSVs
  • csv_uploader
  • Upload a CSV and display the data in a table
• Dates and Times
  • friday "Is it friday yet?" website clone
  • Use some Ruby date functions in a sinatra site

Next Level Ish

• Working with ruby hashes
  • dictionary
  • allow a user to input words and definitions into a memory backed dictionary
• API Calls and image tags
  • gallery
  • show a set of gifs found on giphy
  • pokemon
  • show data about pokemon using PokeAPI
• URL shortener
  • url_shortener
  • Make some custom URL shorteners

How can I help? / What if I run into issues?

• Fork the project, make some commits, and open a pull request! :-)
• Take some of the boilerplate samples (template or hello_world, etc.) and make some new projects we can add to our portfolio
• Take a look at our TODO.md file where we've collected a ton of raw ideas for improvements.
• File an issue and give us some feedback on the apps, especially if you run into any trouble with them.
• There's some very common issues people run into that we'll be updating in this README as they arise.