What are the components of Ruby on Rails that I need to understand?

Question

Hi,

I've been going through this online rails tutorial: http://www.railstutorial.org/ I highly recommend it if you want to get an overview of what rails does and some best practice methods.

But now, as I do my first application, I am having trouble isolating parts of Rails that I need to understand and learn. My question is: What are the components of rails that I need to understand to be competent. If you could point out where the resources are, that would be much appreciation also.

This is a rough idea of what I expect I need to know:

• Basic Ruby
• Model View Controller architecture (MVC)
• Object Orientated Programming
• Plugins
• Tools like Rake
• A test driven framework (rspec?)
• Rails config
• Rails scripts (generate etc)
• How to deploy
• The API
• Where the documentation is (and good resources)
• Agile methodology

This assumes that I am an experienced developer and I have my development environment set up and can do a basic hello world application

Answer 1

Some things that spring to mind...

• Logging and debugging techniques
• Routing and RESTful controllers
• Generators and scaffolding
• Testing and fixtures/factories (eg Test::Unit, RSpec, Shoulda/FactoryGirl)
• Common plugins/gems like authlogic and cancan (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1141998/most-useful-rails-plugins-ruby-libraries-and-ruby-gems)

A good IDE/editor is useful, common ones are TextMate (with bundles), Aptana RadRails, Vim (with plugins).

Definitely check out Ryan Bates' awesome screencasts and http://railscasts.com/