Things to give a go, for now at least:
Erb
Yaml
I think I understand these things enough now:
Gem (for Setup)
Bundle (for Setup)
Prototype (for View)
PrototypeHelper (for View)
jQuery (for View)
Xpath (for View)
CSS (for View)
A good bird's eye view of what's in Rails (expanded from guides.rails.org top
page):
Start Here
Getting Started with Rails
Models
Rails Database Migrations
Active Record Validations and Callbacks
Active Record Associations
Active Record Query Interface
Views
Layouts and Rendering in Rails
Action View Form Helpers
[HAML]
[SASS]
[RJS?]
Controllers
Action Controller Overview
Rails Routing from the Outside In
[The 7 RESTful actions]
Digging Deeper [some content elided]
Testing Rails Applications
[Cucumber (but what is there to learn about it other than Gherkin?)]
[RSpec?]
Debugging Rails Applications
Rails Command Line Tasks and Rake
Tasks
Well-recommended books on Rails:
Agile Web Development with Rails
Ruby on Rails Way [but not for a beginner at Rails]
Ruby on Rails 3 Way [but not for a beginner at Rails]
Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial [but for Rails 3]
Define resource:
The combination of a data model and a web interface to it.
Learn this kind of default routing by heart:
/users index
/users/1 show
/users/new new
/users/1/edit edit
These don't typically render pages:
/users create
/users/1 update
/users destroy
MVC example:
1. Browser visit to /users
2. The router routes /users to the index action in the Users controller;
the router dispatches to the proper controller action; config/routes.rb
is used to set up a table of URL/action pairs
3. The index action asks the User model to retrieve all uesrs
4. The User model pulls all the users from the database
5. The User model returns the list of users to the controller
6. The controller captures the users in the @users variable
and passes @users to the index view
7. The view uses Embedded Ruby to render the page as HTML
8. The controller passes the HTML back to the browser
