Dissecting Ruby on Rails 5 - Become a Professional Developer (Udemy.com)
Don't simply follow a tutorial, learn what it really takes to become a pro Rails developer with this immersive course.
Created by: Jordan Hudgens
Last updated March 2021
Our take
Based on the ratings of 3,145 students, a sample of their written reviews and the syllabus, as the course stood in March 2021. No course pays to be reviewed.
A 43-hour build of one portfolio app in Rails 5, with a Rails 6 section bolted on in March 2021. Jordan Hudgens designed it for bootcamp students who can follow a tutorial but freeze when asked to build a feature from scratch, and every section ends with a deep dive on its hardest concept. The syllabus goes well past CRUD: authentication, authorization, ActionCable live updates, drag and drop, the lib directory, and a Heroku deploy. It suits people who want to understand why Rails does things, not just copy commands.
Reviewers keep using the word why. More than one says he explains the reasoning behind each decision, and a junior developer who had just been hired onto a Rails team said it gave them a better grasp of the fundamentals. The Q&A gets unusual praise, with students saying he answers fast and that the comments already hold fixes for most snags. The complaints are about age. The core content dates from around 2017, so gems and versions break and students end up debugging their way through. There is no testing section, the start is slow and the finish rushed, and the styling section runs nearly five hours.
Compared with the other Rails courses it sits beside, this is the one to pick when the goal is a job, not a first hello world. Pin Rails 5, expect to fix a few breakages, and treat the 2021 Rails 6 lectures as a partial bridge rather than a full refresh. If you want current tooling out of the box, a newer course will frustrate you less. For patient learners, the depth still holds up.
Pros
- Deep dive lecture at the end of each section explains the reasoning, not just the commands
- Reviewers say Q&A replies come fast and the comments already hold fixes for most breakages
- Goes past CRUD into ActionCable live updates, authorization, drag and drop, and a Heroku deploy
- Real workflow habits: Pivotal Tracker, GitHub pull requests, and debugging taught as its own section
Cons
- Core lessons are from around 2017; expect gem and version breakages unless you pin Rails 5
- No testing section, which reviewers flag as the missing piece
- Slow start, rushed finish, and nearly five hours on styling; one reviewer asked for less frontend
So far, the best course for understanding Rails. Deep dives in this course is the main difference to other courses.
Listed as all levels and only asks for basic computer skills, but it really suits people with some coding background who want depth.
What you will learn
- Build a professional Rails application.
- Implement advanced JavaScript components, such as persistent drag and drop functionality and live page update via ActionCable into a Rails application.
- Deploying a Rails application along with the ActionCable web socket feature to Heroku.
- Build a Rails 5 application that utilizes multiple layouts.
- Build jQuery and CoffeeScript components that can be utilized by the Rails application.
Course content
24 sections · 247 lectures · 43 hours of video 3 quizzes, 2 articles
- 1Mac Environment Customization 3 free previews13 lectures · 1 quiz · 1.6 hours
- 2PC Environment Setup 1 free preview13 lectures · 1.8 hours
- 3App Creation and Project Planning 2 free previews14 lectures · 1 quiz · 1.9 hours
- 4Implementing Version Control 2 free previews9 lectures · 1.2 hours
- 5Rails Generators 2 free previews7 lectures · 1.2 hours
- 6Data Flow in Rails 3 free previews19 lectures · 3.7 hours
- 7Data Management in Rails 2 free previews12 lectures · 2.7 hours
- 8Rails 5 Authentication 2 free previews9 lectures · 1.7 hours
- 9Ruby on Rails Controllers 2 free previews7 lectures · 1.4 hours
- 10Working with Views in Rails 2 free previews13 lectures · 2.6 hours
- 11Professional Debugging in Rails 1 free preview6 lectures · 58 min
- 12Using RubyGems 3 free previews7 lectures · 1.1 hours
- 13Implementing Authorization in Rails 1 free preview5 lectures · 42 min
- 14Working with Styles in Rails 2 free previews25 lectures · 4.8 hours
- 15Rails + JavaScript 1 free preview8 lectures · 1.5 hours
- 16Adding Images to a Rails Application 2 free previews8 lectures · 1.5 hours
- 17Guide to Forms in Rails 1 free preview7 lectures · 1.6 hours
- 18Rails Lib Directory 1 free preview5 lectures · 51 min
- 19Live Data in Rails 5 with ActionCable 1 free preview11 lectures · 2 hours
- 20Rails Best Practices 1 free preview21 lectures · 3.6 hours
- 21Deployment5 lectures · 43 min
- 22Course Update3 lectures · 55 min
- 23Rails 6: Introduction to Ruby on Rails 6 2 free previews11 lectures · 1 quiz · 1.8 hours
- 24Ruby on Rails Fundamentals 2 free previews9 lectures · 1.5 hours
Who it is for
The instructor says it suits
- This course is for someone who wants to learn how to build professional grade Ruby on Rails applications
- This course is for developers that want to learn advanced features specific to the Ruby on Rails version 5 framework, such as ActionCable
What you need before you start
- You should have basic computer skills
How it compares
Against the other 81 rated Udemy courses in Ruby on Rails on CourseDuck:
- Rating4.4 out of 5higher than 59% of them
- Reviews3,145#4 of 82 by number of reviews
- Length43.3 hourslonger than 97% of them
- Last updatedMarch 2021more recently than 51% of them
Course Description
Latest course update: March 2021 - Added multiple sections for the Ruby on Rails 6 full course update.
Through the years I've constantly heard the same question from students: "I can follow a tutorial, but I don't feel confident enough to build apps/features from scratch". This course is my answer to that question. I'm not satisfied in simply teaching you how to build an application, my goal is to teach you to understand how to build professional web applications, not to simply follow a tutorial. This is the most comprehensive course I've ever put together and combines my 14+ years of development experience.
I took a completely different approach in building this course. This course is unique for a number of reasons:
Curriculum - After completing the initial course outline I sent it out to a group of CTOs and Senior Rails developers from around the world. I asked them to go through the list of features and add the full set of skills they look for when hiring Rails devs. The course outline literally doubled based on their input. So the features that we're going to build throughout this course aren't simply my idea of what it takes to build progressional grade Rails applications, it's the combined knowledge over over a dozen premier developers from a wide variety of industries. One of the hiring managers who reviewed the outline responded to the outline and said, "If you send me developers who build this full set of features, I'll hire them on the spot!".
Deep Dives - Going through tutorials is great. However, many times courses that simply walk through the build out of a project skip over important concepts. For this reasons I have created a Deep Dive at the end of each section of this course. These guides select the most challenging topics of each section and give a detailed walk through of the concept so that you can completely understand how to work with the key features of the Rails framework.
Full Stack - Many courses promise to teach you how to become a full stack developer, but most of them simply gloss over the concepts that you need in order to build truly professional applications. This course was built to walk you through a real world approach to full stack coding. This includes: backend development with Ruby on Rails, front end coding with HTML/CSS/JavaScript/jQuery, along with advanced ways to use SQL for database management.
Immersive - This is not a light and easy course that you can go through in a weekend. This course was designed specifically for coding bootcamp students that have the goal of becoming professional developers. This means that there is over 35 hours of video lessons and you will build a professional grade Rails application by the time you have completed the course.
So with all that being said, let's talk about everything that we're going to build throughout the guides. We're going to build a feature rich portfolio application that you can actually use for your own portfolio (I'm even using it for my own portfolio). Let's walk through the full feature set of what the application will include:
Building out a professional Rails environment (if you're on a PC I even built a free C9 dashboard that you can use for this course).
We'll utilize Pivotal tracker to follow SCRUM project management best practices throughout the build of this application, just like you'll do in a professional dev shop.
Examine how to work with Rails generators, including how to customize the generators so that you can have your very own scaffolds.
Work with data flow in Rails. One of my strongest beliefs is that if you can understand how data flow works in Rails, you can build anything! With that in mind we'll take a step by step approach for understanding how data comes into a Rails app and how you can build features that utilize the process.
Manage a database. You'll learn advanced SQL techniques for working with data in a Rails application, including how to manage data relationships between tables along with what it takes to implement efficient queries.
Best practices. Writing clean code is one of the key requirements of professional Rails developers, throughout the course we'll walk through what professional grade code looks like and the common patterns you'll need to know in order to build well written applications.
JavaScript and jQuery components. One of the hallmarks of a modern Rails application is the proper integration of JavaScript features. Throughout the course we'll walk through advanced JavaScript features such as how to integrate drag and drop functionality for users and how to build dynamic forms that change based on user input, all without a page refresh!
Streaming Live Data/Page Updates with ActionCable. The top new feature in Rails 5 was definitely Action Cable, which allows for Rails to utilize web sockets and have live page updates. In this course we'll build a real time commenting feature for our portfolio that will showcase your JavaScript skills to everyone who visits your new site.
API Integration. Because most modern applications need to communicate with the outside world, in this course we'll build an integration with the Twitter API to pull in real time tweets into our portfolio application.
RubyGem Libraries. In addition to teaching you about how to use RubyGems in a Rails application, I also show you how to create your very own RubyGem from scratch and walk through how to use it in your application.
In addition to all of these features, we'll also examine: advanced forms, how to integrate professional styles by leveraging Bootstrap 4, building a connection to AWS for file uploads, and how to deploy our application to the web.
In addition to the lectures, I also include the source code for each guide so that you can always have access to the full codebase for the application.
I look forward to going through this immersive program with you and good luck with the coding!
Instructor Details
- 4.4 Rating
3,145 Reviews
Jordan Hudgens
Jordan Hudgens is the CTO and Founder of Bottega where he leads instruction and curriculum development for all of the DevCamp and Bottega code schools around the US.
As a full stack developer for over the past decade, Jordan has traveled the world building applications and training individuals on a variety of technology stacks, including: Ruby on Rails, Python, React JS, React Native, JavaScript, and TypeScript, with a speciality in API and machine learning development.
Jordan has developed applications for Quip, Eventbrite, and DevCamp. As a teacher, he focuses on project driven education, with a focus on jobcentric techniques. This means that he focuses specifically on teaching the skills needed in the development industry. This style of teaching is conducive to learning how to build real world products that adhere to industry best practices.
Additionally Jordan has published multiple books on programming and computer science for Packt Publishing, along with developing training curriculum for Bottega, Learn Co, DevCamp, and AppDev on the topics of Ruby on Rails, Java, AngularJS, NoSQL, API development, TypeScript and algorithms.
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Reviews
By Daniel Lukyanchuk on 1/19/2026
The course is great, but pretty old for 2026
By Kee Cha on 1/8/2021
I just graduated a software development bootcamp and recently got hired as a Junior Web Developer. The company mostly use Ruby for the programming language and Ruby on Rails for their projects. As I already lack the experience in a real world environment for web development, having to learn a new programming language made the anxiety skyrocket. With this course, I am able to get a better grasp on the fundamentals of Rails. I definitely will be rewatching and working on the course project for a better understanding.
By Maria Vlasanovich on 9/3/2020
This course it's from 2016. I'm doing it in 2020 and even tho it's a little outdated it's a very good introduction to Rails. Every time I got to a problem, in the comment section of the video someone had the solution. I also asked some question and the instructor answer them very quickly. It would be nice having an update on the state of Rails in 2020, I had to make a project in Rails 6 and I found that there are no new stuff, articles, videos, etc. I asked questions in stackoverflow and got no answers. Anyway, I likeed the course and I liked Rails.
By Tsotne Okrostsvaridze on 4/28/2020
Very good course and detailed explanations by Jordan. Id like to see comprehensive course from him on Rails API, concentrated on backend side of rails and less frontend please. Thank you.
By Tyler Cloetingh on 1/6/2020
Great course. Even in 2019/2020. A lot of reviews say it's outdated, but you can simply create a rails 5 app (not difficult at all).... and you'll be a better developer by working through the "bugs". Slow in the beginning so you really get a grasp of the work flow, but at the end moves a little fast. The portfolio app is complex with a lot of add ons that need to be configured. Overall highly highly recommend, you won't be disappointed.
By Dave Dunn on 12/26/2018
This is the second of Jordan's courses I have completed and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. The pace is spot on and the level of detail Jordan goes into is excellent. There are lots of practical tips and advice from a real world developer that I think is invaluable. There are also lots of advanced techniques covered and this adds to the overall quality of the course. The lectures are clear, concise and full of detail. Jordan is super responsive to questions and very helpful. I wouldn't change anything about the course really although I would suggest, as an additional course, a broad and detailed deep dive into complex data driven forms for those of us who want to build complicated business applications. I would certainly buy into that!! Thankyou for all of your hard work - I will most likely go through both courses from start to finish again!!
By Cameron Horejs on 10/17/2018
I just finished the course and I loved it! I had a ton of fun learning rails and all of the systems and processes involved in building a rails 5 app. Jordan is a great instructor and I look forward to taking more of his courses in the future.
By Alejandra Rocha on 7/23/2017
It's full of valuable information. Additionally, the course feels like a project you would be doing in the real world and I hope in that same spirit Jordan provides future bonus videos that cover how this project can be improved such as media queries or when Rails 6 comes out which will make form_for helpers obsolete and so on.
By Gray Smith on 5/23/2017
Jordan explains everything so well! I've taken a lot of Udemy courses on Rails, and I really think things are clicking for me in a different way on this one! This course is very well planned out and Jordan is enthusiastic, fun to listen to, and has promptly answered all of my questions! Thanks Jordan, can't wait for the next course! One improvement I would make is the audio during some of the lectures could be improved a little bit, it sounds great when he is talking to the camera and then changes when he is screensharing and there seems to be some background noise.
By Patrick Fossung on 3/5/2017
Very good instructor. His approach to teaching is incredible. He decodes the complexity of writing code with ease that will inspire you to software development. I really lack words to express how good and experienced he is with the ruby language and teaching. I meet a lot of experienced developers with a great understanding of software engineering but they always lack the ability to teach and explain to beginners but this instructor clearly understands the problems of beginner programmers. He is the best to bring you out of coding blackouts . I will recommend him 200%
Quality Score
Overall Score : 88 / 100












