This repo contains a collection of "obstacle courses" that are laser-focused on quickly leveling up very discrete skills.
I'm building these resources to help myself learn (slowly) and then to be able to hand this resource to someone else, and in a fraction of the time it took me to learn this, I want them to be able to learn >60% of what I've learned.
note: You probably got here by way of intermediateruby.com. Head over there for more context and information:
https://intermediateruby.com/intermediate-ruby-obstacle-course
- Nokogiri Obstacle Course
- Rubocop Obstacle Course
Become a better developer
isn't super actionable.
On the flip side
Write good tests for your views
is actionable, and has the side effect of helping you get better at writing integration tests that use css-selector-based assertions.
Integration tests differ from unit tests, in that they should show all the individual bits of functionality of your app "integrated" together. They're often written in a format of:
when I visit logged_in_admin_dashboard_path
I expect to see {account.name} in {some location}
I expect to see {statistics} in {other page location}
I expect to see {comments} in {another location}
The "location" pieces are usually defined with CSS selectors, which uses a mix of Selenium, Capybara and Nokogiri.
These tests use minitest, but this knowledge will be perfectly portable to rspec testing as well.
So, this nokogiri obstacle course will help you write better integration tests!
To write integration tests, you need to understand the basics of parsing the DOM. To do this, you need to use a tool called nokogiri.
Beyond testing views, you can also use nokogiri to scrape websites.
Before I started this Nokogiri project, I said to myself:
Hey, I kinda know how to use Nokogiri...
And could kinda-sorta stumble my way through some web scraping, but I couldn't do anything complicated with it, and didn't feel confident that I could sit down and scrape arbitrary data from an arbitrary webpage.
To get started, clone down this repo using the following URL:
$ git clone git@github.com:josh-works/intermediate_ruby_obstacle_course.git
# if you need to use https: git clone https://github.com/josh-works/intermediate_ruby_obstacle_course.git
$ cd intermediate_ruby_obstacle_courses
$ bundle install
$ atom . # or whatever command you use to open up a repo in your code editorThere's a readme.md file with detailed information on each of the 21 tests you'll work through, located in the nokogiri directory. Once you clone this repo down, open up the readme, and get to work!
You can also navigate to https://github.com/josh-works/intermediate_ruby_obstacle_course/tree/master/nokogiri in your browser, to see what's in the README.
These are generous, kind, competent, empathetic developers that have contributed to this project, and if they're ever available to hire, hire them immediately because they won't be on the market for long