Launch School

This is our level up to professional grade course. The goal of this course is to take you beyond a beginner Rails developer and learn what it takes to launch real, robust and production quality applications. We assume you already have a good understanding of Ruby and Rails foundations, so this course will focus on the processes, workflows and best practices of experienced developers. We take you through building a non-trivial e-commerce application, a clone of NetFlix, with full payment processing, account management, and administration capabilities. Along the way, we'll demonstrate application level design concerns and trade-offs that you'll face in real applications. During the process of building all those features, we'll show you how to use Test Driven Development (TDD) to build production-level robustness and manage complexity in a growing codebase. Towards the end, we will teach you post-launch best practices around monitoring, data backups and ongoing maintainenance concerns.

We'll build a fun and engaging blackjack game from the ground up. Along the way, we'll cover basic Ruby structures and systematically build up the program's complexity and introduce you to Object Oriented Programming and best practices. You'll never have this much fun learning programming! We then move the game to the web, and explore important topics like HTTP, dynamice view templates, processing requests and responses, routing, etc using Sinatra, a lightweight Ruby based web development framework. By the end of this course, you will have built and launched your first Ruby web application.

This course is our curated program to learn core Ruby on Rails fundamentals. We will build from scratch a clone of the popular news sharing site Reddit and walk you through every core Rails concept in detail, resulting in your second launched web application. The main goal of this course is to introduce you to Rails conventions, then peel back the magic and dissect how it all works under the hood. In addition to learning Rails, you will also see how features are gradually introduced, and how the application grows in functionality.