Railscasts Pro - Video Tutorials for Ruby on Rails (Updated 19.02.2012)

Duration : 10-15 minutes Type of material distributed by the : Video Tutorial Language : English Description : For more advanced episodes every week in addition to the free weekly episodes, more advanced episodes every Monday. Ryan Bates will delve into advanced topics such as testing, deployment, best practices, and much more! Revised versions of old episodes of revised versions of old episodes will be released within a week.

#287 Presenters from Scratch
Oct 03, 2011 | 14 minutes | Views, Refactoring
Clean up complex view logic with the help of presenters, and doing this from scratch gives you a lot of flexibility. Here I show not only how to create presenters, but how to test them using Test Unit and RSpec.
#51 will_paginate (revised)
Oct 06, 2011 | 6 minutes | Plugins
Almost every Rails application needs pagination, and will_paginate is a great way to go. Here I show you how to set it up, customize the way it looks, and see how it compares with Kaminari.
#289 PayPal Recurring Billing
Oct 10, 2011 | 24 minutes | eCommerce
Here I show how to add PayPal recurring payments to an existing checkout process using PayPal's Express Checkout and the paypal-recurring gem.
#147 Sortable Lists (revised)
Oct 13, 2011 | 6 minutes | Views, Ajax
Here I show how to use jQuery UI to make a sortable list and a "sort" action to handle the updating. Top it off with acts_as_list to make it feature complete.
#291 Testing with VCR
Oct 17, 2011 | 13 minutes | Testing, Plugins
If you ever need to test an application which communicates with an external API, VCR is the way to go. Here I show a workflow in RSpec, how to use with capybara-mechanize, how to add sanitization filtering, and more.
#104 Exception Notifications (revised)
Oct 20, 2011 | 6 minutes | Plugins, Debugging
Few things are worse than seeing a "Something went wrong" 500 error on your production application. Here I show how to be notified when this happens using exception_notification and mention several other alternatives.
#293 Nginx & Unicorn
Oct 24, 2011 | 19 minutes | Tools, Production
Nginx and Unicorn make a killer-combo for hosting a Rails application in production. Learn how to configure each in a Vagrant virtual machine in this episode.
#158 Factories not Fixtures (revised)
Oct 27, 2011 | 9 minutes | Testing, Tools
Fixtures are external dependencies which can make tests brittle and difficult to read. In this episode I show how to use Factory Girl to generate the needed records directly in the tests.
#295 Sharing Mustache Templates
Oct 31, 2011 | 17 minutes | Views, Plugins
Mustache is a simple, logic-less templating language which allows you to use the same template for both Ruby and javascript. See how to set it up with a custom template handler in this episode.
#153 PDFs with Prawn (revised)
Nov 03, 2011 | 11 minutes | Plugins
Prawn is an excellent Ruby library for generating PDF documents. Here you will learn how to add it to a Rails application through a separate PDF renderer class.
#297 Running javascript in Ruby
Nov 07, 2011 | 14 minutes | Plugins, Ajax, Views
Sometimes logic needs to be shared between the server-side (Ruby) and the client-side (javascript). Here I show how to run javascript directly in Ruby through ExecJS and therubyracer.
#102 Auto-Complete Association (revised)
Nov 10, 2011 | 9 minutes | Forms, Ajax
A select menu is often used for setting a belongs_to association, but you should also consider using a text field with autocomple. Here I use jQuery UI and show two different solutions: client side and server side.
#299 Rails Initialization Walkthrough
Nov 14, 2011 | 13 minutes | Rails 3.1
In this episode I walk you through the internals of the Rails initialization process and show exactly what happens behind the scenes when starting up the Rails application.
#111 Advanced Search Form (revised)
Nov 17, 2011 | 6 minutes | Views, Forms, Search
It is often best to use a GET request when submitting a search form, however if it is an advanced search form with a lot of fields then this may not be ideal. Here I how how to create a search resource to handle this.
#301 Extracting a Ruby Gem
Nov 21, 2011 | 16 minutes | Plugins, Testing
In this episode I show how to extract a Ruby Gem from an existing Rails application, test it with RSpec and Supermodel, and a add Railtie.
#88 Dynamic Select Menus (revised)
Nov 25, 2011 | 7 minutes | Forms, Views
Do you need to dynamically change one select menu based on the value of another? Here I show how to filter states/provinces by a selected country using grouped options and a dab of CoffeeScript.
#303 Publishing a Gem
Nov 28, 2011 | 11 minutes | Tools
In this second part on making a gem, you will learn how to publish a gem by releasing it to rubygems.org, testing it through Travis CI, documenting it on RubyDoc.info, and advertising it on various sites.
#182 Cropping Images (revised)
Dec 02, 2011 | 11 minutes | Plugins, Forms
Allow users to interactively crop uploaded images using Jcrop and Carrierwave. Includes a live preview that shows the resulting image.
#305 Authentication with Warden
Dec 05, 2011 | 12 minutes | Authentication
Warden makes it easy to move authentication up into Rack middleware. This means authentication can be accessed outside of a Rails controller such as in routes or in a mountable engine.
#120 Thinking Sphinx (revised)
Dec 09, 2011 | 10 minutes | Active Record, Plugins, Search
Sphinx is a full-text search engine for use with MySQL or PostgreSQL. Learn how to add Thinking Sphinx by defining an index on your model and searching with various options.
#307 ElasticSearch Part 2
Dec 12, 2011 | 16 minutes | Search, Plugins
This final part on ElasticSearch and Tire will show how to make more complex search queries, customize the indexing, and add facets.
#114 Endless Page (revised)
Dec 16, 2011 | 7 minutes | Ajax
Transform traditional pagination into infinite scrolling which will automatically fetch more records when the user scrolls down to the bottom of the page.
#309 A Shell-Scripting Story
Dec 19, 2011 | 10 minutes | Tools
This episode continues off of the previous episode on Oh My ZSH showing how to script Z Shell. Here I show how to write a Rake autocompletion script and cover a few more useful utilities.
#17 HABTM Checkboxes (revised)
Dec 22, 2011 | 6 minutes | Active Record, Forms, Views
A many-to-many association can be edited through checkboxes in a form. Here I show how to do this with a has_many through association compete with clickable labels.
#311 Form Builders
Dec 26, 2011 | 12 minutes | Forms, Views, Refactoring
Forms often follow a similar pattern with a lot of repetition. Learn how to clean up form views and remove duplication with the help of form builders.
#164 Cron in Ruby
Dec 29, 2011 | 6 minutes | Tools, Plugins
Cron is a common solution for recurring jobs, but it has a confusing syntax. In this episode I show you how to use Whenever to create cron jobs using Ruby. Some alternative scheduling solutions are also mentioned.
#313 Receiving Email with Mailman
Jan 02, 2012 | 11 minutes | Tools
The Mailman gem makes it easy to receive email in a Rails application. Here I show how to write a script to run Mailman in its own process and pull down mail from a POP3 account.
#171 Delayed Job (revised)
Jan 07, 2012 | 8 minutes | Plugins, Background Jobs
Long requests should be moved into a background process, and Delayed Job is one of the easiest ways to do this because it works with an Active Record database.
#315 Rollout and Degrade
Jan 09, 2012 | 13 minutes | Plugins, Deployment
Learn how to use the Rollout gem to deploy a feature to a select group of users and the Degrade gem to automatically disable it upon failure. Also included is a way of doing this from scratch.
#123 Subdomains (revised)
Jan 13, 2012 | 7 minutes | Routing, Rails 3.1
In Rails 3.1 subdomains are easier than ever to use. Here I show how to route a subdomain to a specific controller action, generate links, nest resources, and more.
#317 Rack App from Scratch
Jan 16, 2012 | 15 minutes | Tools
Rack comes with many helpful utilities such as request and response objects, various middleware, and MockRequest for testing. Here I cover all of these while building a Rack app from scratch.
#72 Adding an Environment (revised)
Jan 19, 2012 | 4 minutes |
Rails comes with three environments: development, test, and production, but it is easy to add your own. Here I show how to add a separate staging environment and how to start up Rails under this.
#319 Rails Middleware Walkthrough
Jan 23, 2012 | 14 minutes | Rack
Here I describe each Rack middleware that is included in a Rails app which will give you a better understanding of what a request goes through behind the scenes before it hits your application.
#150 Rails Metal (revised)
Jan 27, 2012 | 6 minutes | Rack
Rails metal may have been removed in Rails 3, but it is possible to bypass the entire Rails stack through middleware as shown in this episode.
#321 HTTP Caching
Jan 30, 2012 | 15 minutes | Caching, Views, Performance
With HTTP response headers you can the cache in the user's browser and proxies. Etags, Last-Modified, Cache-Control and Rack::Cache are all covered here
#89 Page Caching (revised)
Feb 02, 2012 | 9 minutes | Caching, Performance
Page caching is an efficient way to cache full content to be served by the front-end web server. Learn how to deal with pagination, expiration with sweepers, and user-specific content in this episode.
#323 Backbone on Rails Part 1
Feb 08, 2012 | 18 minutes | Plugins, Ajax
In this first part of a two part series you will learn basic Backbone concepts including models, collections, routers, views and events. The backbone-on-rails gem is used for Rails integration.
#169 Dynamic Page Caching (revised)
Feb 11, 2012 | 7 minutes | Caching, Performance, Ajax
Page caching is great for speeding up the performance of a page, but what if it contains user-specific content? Learn how to load content in dynamically through javascript in this episode.
#325 Backbone on Rails Part 2
Feb 13, 2012 | 24 minutes | Plugins, Ajax
In the second part of this two part series on Backbone.js, we finish up the Raffler application. Included is how to create entries through a form, respond to events, extract sub-views, pre-populate records, visit routes, and more.