Building Hybrid Mobile App using Ionic Framework

I am exploring different options for creating my first mobile app. I am from a web development background using Rails and Postgres.

I am unsure of how something like the Ionic framework works. I've looked around on the web but I weren't able to find answers to my specific question. Is my understanding correct that I will be able to create a full Rails/Postgres backend with various API's and then talk to the backend from my Hybrid mobile app (Ionic framework)?

Can anybody point me to a tutorial that might have worked for them please?

So if you have any epxerience in web design ionic is a very easy. You build a webpage just like you would for hosting on a server. All ionic does, along with angular js, is extend html's vocabulary using something called directives. I would use the intel xdk. It has brackets as a built in text editor, a built in phone emulator, and a build server for mobile apps all tied into one. You can also start with an ionic template. what you end up with is some html, javascript (mostly angular js), and some css. Then that code is built into a mobile app for whatever platform you choose through the cordova build process. You can grab the intel xdk here https://software.intel.com/en-us/html5/tools, ionic docs are here http://ionicframework.com/docs/, and an ionic tutorial here http://ionicframework.com/getting-started/. Best of luck to you!