Where to go from here?

So you went through the basic tutorials, cool. You know what HTML, CSS and JS mean and you had your first experience with Ruby on Rails. That is awesome, congratulations! But no worries, there is a lot more to discover.

There are a couple of directions you can choose now. Depending where your interest lies, with what you have seen so far.

1. Pushing your code to github.com

Software is usually kept in version control systems, to be able to go back in history and deal with different versions of the same files efficiently. Git has become the default in the last 5 years and github.com one of the most popular sites for hosting open source projects.

This guide will show you some basics of git and how to upload your code to github.com.

Go to guide

2. Putting your app up on the web

Developing software on your computer is nice, but putting it up on the web for everybody to see is the ultimate goal. There are many different ways of deploying a Ruby on Rails app to a server. Heroku is one of the simplest and fastest ways to do that. If you’re interested in learning how to do that, have a look at the

Heroku guide.

3. Add user authentication

Most web apps have some kind of user authentication. There are many reasons to do this. Protecting your data, protecting the users data, saving preferences .. The concept of users and authentication is an important and interesting one in the web development realm. If you want to give it a shot have a look at this guide

Authentication with devise.

4. Testing

Testing code is a huge part of using Rails. Testing one method with another method might seem weird in the beginning, but using good frameworks and best practices it is the only way to keep the complexity of a real world application under control. If you would like to explore that, have a look at the

TDD introduction.

Is there even more?

Of course. If you’re already done with the above, or didn’t find anything you really liked, there are sheer endless possibilities to dive deeper into any of the subjects we already touch upon today. You can check the official RailsGirls.com list of guides for inspiration.

Furthermore using google should give you quite a number of results on Rails and web development in general. Try this link for example.