New to Rails: How to pass arguments from a textbox to another controller?

I am new to Rails and don't quite understand what I'm supposed to do. Let's say, for example, I wan开发者_开发百科t a textbox containing a string to be passed into another controller (another page?) when the user clicks a button. How would I go about doing that?

Functions of controllers are pages, correct? Can a function take parameters just like a normal method? (E.g. sum(x,y))

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For complete information, check out Rails Form helpers. Basically, you give the form_tag method a path which points to the controller and the action that you want to handle the form submission. For example,

<%= form_tag(search_path, :method => "get") do %>
    <%= label_tag(:q, "Search for:") %>
    <%= text_field_tag(:q) %>
    <%= submit_tag("Search") %>
<% end %>

Here, the action and controller that search_path points to (defined in your routes) will receive the form submission and the value from the text field.

Your action in the controller IS a function, but it will not receive the value from the form submission as a parameter to the function. Instead, you will access it through the params hash. In the example above, you can access the value from the text field as

params[:q]

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What are you doing with the string? Storing it? Using it as a parameter on another page?

I suggest you take a look at the Getting Started Guide, go through it, and pay particular attention to the What is Rails? section, where it explains MVC architecture and REST (Representational State Transfer.)

There are dozens of other Rails tutuorials out there, I'm sure if you searched this site you'd find many questions like this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2794297/how-to-learn-ruby-on-rails-as-a-complete-programming-beginner

Functions of controllers are pages, correct? Can a function take parameters just like a normal method?

Functions of controllers are pages if that's the route you've set up in your routes.rb configuration file. I suggest you run through some tutorials to understand what Rails is for and how it works.