life.events.each { |event| learn_from(event) }

In Part II of this Ruby on Rails tutorial, I’m going to hit the ground running with the concept of Behavior-Driven Development, or BDD. We’ll get into RSpec, its syntax, and why we use it, all while creating ourselves an `author’ resource that will form the basis of our blog system. I’ll be assuming that you’ve got Rails installed, an application started, and your database set up (though, currently, table-less), since Part I covers how to do those. Before starting to work on this, you’ll want to fire up the database server so that we can use it.

Back last July, I wrote a Ruby on Rails tutorial as I was learning Rails. On the one hand, I’m rather proud of the tutorial. It’s pretty plainspoken and straightforward. On the other hand, in the year since I wrote that tutorial, I have learned vast amounts about Ruby and Rails. I still wouldn’t come anywhere near calling myself an expert, of course. That would be foolish. But I have a firmer grasp of what’s possible, and of best practices, and of many other things that could make that tutorial Better™. So I decided it was about time I did that.

What I’m about to do is nab the Rails tutorial and redo it. I was intending on the original tutorial having several parts, each covering some more ground on a single application. I ended up only writing two, but mostly because of time constraints. This time, I hope to update those two and then write several more, so as to complete my original vision. This is part I, which covers about the same ground as half of the original first part, but from a Rails 1.2, REST, BDD, etc, point of view. I think what I really liked about my original tutorial was the fact that it started at the most basic level (installing Rails) and started going into neat things like before_filter and such with real examples (like authentication). I intend on bringing in some plugins and things like that later on, in part to show refactoring and in part to introduce a lot of the neat plugins that already exist out there and can make a Rails developer’s life easier.

Anyway, without further ado, following is A Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Blogification, Part I: Introduction and Setup.