A “Free” online course: Sinatra 101

A “Free” online course: Sinatra 101

RubyLearning announces the tenth batch of its “Free” online “Sinatra 101” course starting from Saturday 2nd Mar. 2013.

Sinatra – quickly create tiny web apps and services

What’s Sinatra?

Sinatra is a micro-framework for quickly creating tiny web-applications and small services in Ruby. It is not a Model-View-Controller (MVC) based framework.

Please read – Sinatra, a Ruby web framework, and Why it Matters.

Thanks to Heroku for providing the facility to create free hosting accounts for all the participants, to host their apps created during the course. Heroku – it’s fast, it’s easy, and it just works!

What Will I Learn?

In this introductory course, you will learn the essential features of Sinatra that you will end up using every day. The course topics are:

• What is Sinatra?
• Sinatra Installation and its dependencies
• Routes
• set
• before block
• pass
• status
• Building a trivial Sinatra application
• Deployment of a Sinatra app to Heroku
• Views – ERB and HAML
• Handler
• Form parameters
• Layouts
• Error Handling – 404 and 500
• Helpers
• Exercises
  • Hosting a static webpage on Heroku
  • Text String Reversal Service
  • Stock Exchange Quote Service
  • Using Sinatra to access the Google+ API
  • Running a Sinatra app using JRuby
  • A Sorter Web Service in Sinatra
  • Finding Photos on Flickr
  • A Sinatra app to access GEO Info via GeoCoder
  • Simple CRUD app with ActiveRecord, SQLite3 and YAML
• Using Rack Middleware

You can read through the RubyLearning FAQ.

Some Fun Apps

Here are some of the fun apps created by the previous batch participants and deployed to Heroku:

• A static webpage.
• String Reversal Service.
• Stock Exchange Quote Service.
• Using Sinatra to access the Google+ API.
• A Sorter Web Service in Sinatra
• Finding Photos on Flickr
• A Sinatra app to access GEO Info via GeoCoder

Yes, you too can build all such applications and many more.

Who’s It For?

Anyone who knows the Ruby programming language can take the “Sinatra 101” course, and is a starting point for people new to Sinatra and a guide to help learn it as quickly and easily as possible.

Dates

The course starts on Saturday 2nd Mar. 2013 and runs for a week.

Is the course really free?

A lot of effort and time goes into building such a course and we would really love that you pay at least US$ 10 for the course. However, you are under no obligation to pay anything at all and hence the course would be free for you. For those who contribute US$ 10 or more, we shall email them a copy of the book (.pdf) “Introduction to Sinatra” – the course is based on this book.

How do I register?

• You can pay either by Paypal or send cash via Western Union Money Transfer or by bank transfer (if you are in India). The fees collected helps RubyLearning maintain the site, the various courses and provide quality content to you.
• Once you pay the fees below, register on the RubyLearning.org site and send us your name and registered email id while creating an account at RubyLearning.org to satish [at] rubylearning [dot] org We will enrol you into the course which normally takes place within 48 hours.

After you click the “Pay Now” button below, you will be taken to a webpage as shown below.

Please enter the amount you want to pay for the course in the “Item price” field and click on the “Update” link. You can safely pay via PayPal.

You can now pay the Course Fees by clicking on the “Pay Now” button below.

Famous Rubyists using Sinatra talked to RubyLearning and gave us their views on:

• How do I learn and master Sinatra?
• The 12 rules of Sinatra

Also, thanks to Adam Keys, Aaron Quint, and Ryan Tomayko for sharing their expertise on Sinatra with the course participants.

So hurry, registrations have started.

By the end of the course, you can quickly create your own tiny web-applications in Ruby and write lots of small services.