The first class is sold out. We will be offering a second section beginning in approximately a month. To be notified of the second class, add your name to the waitlist.

This class meets every Thursday for eight weeks. The first session is Thursday, May 26th. The class will be taught by Anthony Lewis.  In addition to being an accomplished Rails developer, Anthony has taught many staff development classes as well as an AP Computer Science class for high school juniors and seniors.

The prerequisites for this class are a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS. Prior experience with a programming language will be beneficial but not required. No prior knowledge of Rails or Ruby is assumed.

Students will also need to bring a laptop to class so that they can work along with the examples.

Below is the tentative class outline. It may be modified based on the skills and needs of the attendees.

The first session will start with installing the development environment and an overview of tools used by
Rails developers. Next a sample application will be created and explored to demonstrate the Rails MVC
architecture.

The next three sessions will cover the three main components of every Rails application: Model, View,
and Controller. Each component will be described in detail as we add features to the sample
application.

Session five will cover application testing and test driven development. We will create a new application
from scratch using test driven development.

Session six will cover more advanced Rails features such as User Sessions and Unobtrusive JavaScript.
We will use these to add additional features to our new application. We will also discuss debugging.

Session seven will provide an overview of many popular gems used in Rails applications. We will add
authentication, authorization, pagination, and easy file uploads to the application.

Session eight will wrap up the series by covering application security and deployment. We will first use
git to deploy the application to Heroku and then use Capistrano to deploy to any host. We will also
cover performance monitoring and testing of Rails applications.

If you have any questions regarding the class, send us a note at rails@geekaustin.org.