This is an Intro to Rails course, intended for eventual inclusion in the Girl Develop It Core Curriculum. All material by Cheri Allen, inspired by Railsbridge.

The course is meant to be taught in four two-hour workshops. Each of the slides and practice files are customizable according to the needs of a given class or audience.

Cheri's slides can be viewed here.

Ready to build on your basic Ruby knowledge to start building full web applications? It's time to learn Rails!

Rails is a framework that makes creating web applications relatively quick and easy. There is a thriving community around it, a strong job market, and ample resources available to beginners. Rails powers applications like Living Social, Groupon, Twitter, Square, Github and more.

Through classroom instruction, group excercises, and homework, you'll get a solid introduction to the fundamentals of building Rails applications. By the end of the course, you'll have built at least three complete web apps, including a blogging framework with user authentication, and you'll have the knowledge and resources to continue building.

Please prepare for this class by setting up your development environment, following this guide: http://docs.railsbridge.org/installfest/. If you encounter any problems or have questions about the process, attend our Coffee & Code before the class begins, and volunteers will be available to help you out.

This course runs for four Thursdays:

Class 1: Intro to Rails

Class 2: Working With Objects

Class 3: Active Record In Depth

Class 4: Deploying to Heroku & Professional Best Practices

Note: To get the most out of this course, you'll need a modicum of Ruby knowledge. If you didn't attend our recent Intro to Ruby course, I would recommend working through at least some of Code Academy's Ruby Track to prepare: http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/ruby

At this time, you will need to provide your own laptop - PC or Mac - to participate in the course.