Sara Learns to Code. Making an App from Scratch

At first Git can be a tad confusing, but with a little practice it's easy to use and even easier to appreciate.

Here we generate a new Rails application, and run it locally.

Begin our Rails development workflow properly.

Where to start analyzing our new application?  The Gem File is as good a place as any to start.  Learn how Gems make application development easier.

It's essential that our app have a responsive design from the start so that it's pages look great on desktops, mobile phones, and all devices.  Bootstrap makes it easy.

We'll learn how we can make a landing page for our application.

By writing some CSS and HTML, we make the pages on our app informative and beautiful.

With a little bit of knowledge and the right tools, we can make our pages look great on phones, tablets, and desktops.

Put the code on our computer online in just a few quick and easy steps.

Let's review how easy it is to get online, and to add Heroku resources to make the most of our internet success.

Together we'll find out how a little CSS goes a long way.

Together we'll find out how a little HTML and Bootstrap goes a long way.

The world of coding is one of collaboration and helping others.  Legal and other considerations await.

Understand the process of adding a new View with its corresponding Route and Controller function.

Together we'll learn the amazing Rails way for links and bottons.

Just because we might want our code to be an open source project to share with others doesn't mean we don't have secrets.  When dealing with other peoples' credit cards we have to know how to keep some things private.

Together we'll go through the entire process of implementing Stripe's Checkout so that our app can take credit card payments.  Money has never been so easy to make.

Stripe, and it's secrets have to be put onto Heroku.  

We made money with Stripe so quickly that we need to take a few minutes to review things.

Now that we have a great app that takes credit card payments and is deployed online, we'll plan for moving forward with creating a database and allowing people to sign up for an account.

Anyone can clone any project from Github, and start coding right where the other person left off.

We'll right code generates and migrates a database table for Posts that guests can leave on our application.

We'll create a view with a form that guests can fill out to leave a Post on our application.  This post will be saved on our database so that we can access it later.

Read the database entries that are left on our app after guests write Posts, and then render the Post content on our views.

Take the data that is saved when a guest makes a post, and render it on any view we choose.

Make an individual page for each Post entry that a guest adds to our database.  This page can display whatever details we've saved regarding a Post.

Write code on the Post model file to require certain functionality when a Post is entered into the database by a guest.

Use Devise's powerful authentication suite in our app which allows for guests to sign up for an account just like in any proper social network.

Add features that our signed up Users would expect.  Users demand the ability to easily sign in, sign out, edit their profile, and retrieve their password.

Implement database associations that allows us to tie our signed in Users to the actions they take on our app, such as writing Posts.

Write the proper code to allow our signed up Users to delete their Posts while also not being able to mess with the Posts of other people.

Let's review our Model-View-Controller application that we have built thus far, and consider some great resources for mastering the principles of building an app the Rails way.