Latest Free Screencasts

  Single Table Inheritance is a great way to handle related models that descend from the same class. The classic example is a Car class with Ford, Chevy, and Honda subclasses. This Ruby on Rails Tutorial provides an example and explains how Rails puts all of the information in the same database table and allows [...]

Kevin Ball shows how the traditional model of username/password authentication is dying, and how Omniauth makes it all rainbows and sunshine going forward. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.

It's always important to keep your ActiveRecord models in tip-top shape. Ben Hughes explores several techniques for refactoring models and preventing them from getting out of hand. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.

Mongoid is a polished, high-level Ruby gem for accessing MongoDB. Here I cover installation, adding fields, validations, associations, and keys.

It is important to use attr_accessible for security with mass assignment, but what if you need it to be dynamic based on user permissions? See how in this episode.

In Rails 3 the non-database functionality of Active Record is extracted out into Active Model. This allows you to cleanly add validations and other features to tableless models.

We escape multi-word search terms before querying Google Blog Search.

ActiveRecord 3.0’s big new feature is a brand new finder API that is backed by ActiveRelation, or Arel for short. Arel is a Ruby implementation of relational algebra. This week’s screencast will be a hands-on demonstration of the new ActiveRecord finder API and an article that will cover the topic...

Ruby on Rails allows you to nest models within a form. Ryan Bates of Railscasts demonstrated how to set up these forms with JavaScript using the Prototype framework, which ships with Rails. In this episode, Charles Max Wood gives a brief overview of how Ryan’s code works, and then refactors the JavaScript to use JQuery. [...]

Handling multiple models in a single form is much easier with the accepts_nested_attributes_for method. See how to use this method to handle nested model fields.