I touched on it briefly in the “What is Ruby on Rails?” section, but no worries. Ruby on Rails allows developers (that's you!) to be really productive quickly for building apps. Teams of all different sizes and backgrounds have all been able to build and iterate on products quickly with Rails.

How does Rails do this? Well, Rails helpfully includes a ton of super helpful frameworks that you can leverage to build your next application. Do you envision needing some kind of real-time chat using “WebSockets”? ActionCable helps you out there. You want users to be able to upload images? ActiveStorage has you covered. 

Want users to be able to do fancy things like bold their text or include images in descriptions? ActionText, with an assist from ActiveStorage, will do the trick.

While it is possible to make a web app that doesn’t need a database, Rails includes ActiveRecord that makes it super easy to create and view records in a database. You can even use different databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL and a few more.

Don’t know for sure what you want or need? That’s okay. We’re going to go over almost everything in the course, so you’ll get a good idea of the true power of Rails.

Additional benefits to picking Rails in 2020 is that the community and tool ecosystem has matured greatly. We have so many great resources for learning and growing, with screencast sites like GoRails you can continue to grow as a developer. Our tools are stable, and there is almost a Ruby gem for everything you could think of.