Layouts provide a common look and feel between views of your application. When you generate a new Rails app, a layout is automatically created by default within the app/views directory. Within the app/views/layouts folder is a file created named application.html.erb which is where common components are added such as the header, body, footer, and navigation to make a complete view.
I’ll have to admit that this second time around, building this application was actually pretty fun! For project #2 I chose to build a Sinatra application for users to keep track of their book collection.
When building web applications there are so many files and thousands of lines of code to keep up with that it would be impossible to keep everything in one big file. Your web application would be very disorganized, hard to read and it would be a headache to debug.
Semantic HTML or semantic mark-up are elements used to describe what kind of content exists within a specific tag. It introduces meaning to the web page rather than just presentation and makes it clearer for both the developer and browser to understand. Overall, it makes it easier to style pages, help search engines identify and categorize content on websites, and allows for easier styling of specific semantic elements when using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
Completing the CLI gem project has been a great learning experience for me in helping to solidify the concepts I learned in the Object Oriented Ruby module. The project calls on essential knowledge of both Ruby and the Command Line Interface (CLI). The essentials include the use “if” statements, variable scopes, object instantiation, instant and method use, method return types, iteration, the use of command line, and scraping or being able to pull data from an external source. With these concepts, I was able to integrate all that was learned into this project. The project itself took me about a week to complete due to my work schedule, however there are a few tips I that helped the process of completing the project move smoothly.