Tutorials & Tips

This article is not intended to be a booster piece for Rails nor is it an expose. It’s simply an introduction to the technology. It contains both praise and criticism. At times the criticism might appear a bit heavy handed (especially to Rails enthusiasts), but don’t be fooled. Using any Web application framework is going to be tricky, whether it’s J2EE, ASP.NET, or PHP. In the long run, you can be a lot more productive with Rails than you can be with many other Web application development platforms, but it takes time to learn the ropes.

This article is not intended to be a booster piece for Rails nor is it an expose. It’s simply an introduction to the technology. It contains both praise and criticism. At times the criticism might appear a bit heavy handed (especially to Rails enthusiasts), but don’t be fooled. Using any Web application framework is going to be tricky, whether it’s J2EE, ASP.NET, or PHP. In the long run, you can be a lot more productive with Rails than you can be with many other Web application development platforms, but it takes time to learn the ropes.

The Rails framework takes most of the headache away from developing these relationships and almost entirely eliminates the need to write low-level queries to your database. If you've spent time writing those queries, Rails' ActiveRecord will make sense, but for those of you who are just getting started this can be confusing.

Here's a quick Howto on setting up Ruby on Rails for Windows.

This tutorial will focus on the ActionController. The first sections will cover the services provided by ActionController and the techniques to access them. The final section will provide insight into using these techniques in the real world.

This article covers the basic services provided by the ActionView. The ActionView helps you present data to your users. Keep reading to learn some terminology and study an example application.

Ruby is an interpreted scripting language, just like Python and PHP. SitePoint's author Daniel Bogan take a look at the language and how it can be used in web development.

Ruby has many exciting object oriented features, but a large percentage of your code will revolve around arrays. In this valuable tutorial, we’re going to show you some tips and tricks for this powerful data structure.