Product Description

You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management.

But Rails is more than a set of best practices. Rails makes it both fun and easy to turn out very cool web applications. Need Ajax support, so your web applications are highly interactive? Rails has it built in. Want an application that sends and receives e-mail? Built in. Supports internationalization and localization? Built in. Do you need applications with a REST-based interface (so they can interact with other RESTful applications with almost no effort on your part)? All built-in.

With this book, you'll learn how to use ActiveRecord to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. Need to create and modify your schema? Migrations make it painless (and they're versioned, so you can roll changes backward and forward). You'll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic, user-centric web-pages using built-in Javascript and Ajax support. There is extensive coverage of testing, and the rewritten Deployment chapter now covers Phusion Passenger.

As with the previous editions of the book, we start with an extended tutorial that builds parts of an online store. And, of course, the application has been rewritten to show the best of Rails V2.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38918 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 767 pages

About the Author
Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to the many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the popular Feed Validator web service. He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group of IBM. He resides in Raleigh, North Carolina.

As one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas understands agility. As the author of "Programming Ruby", he understands Ruby and how to describe Ruby applications.

David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of the Rails framework.

Customer Reviews

The standard for Rails
By far the best Rails book money can buy, and I've browsed most of them if not all.

First, if you still had doubts, YES you need a book to really get a good, rapid grip on rails. It's moving at lightning speed, in fact a new release showed up a few days after this 3rd edition went to print. A recent rails book is worth a million outdated screencasts and hacked together tutorials.

The review process is worth mentionning. Each edition of this book go through a long beta process where it is reviewed by 'beta readers' - this edition went through 10 iterations for example. This means you'll find far less typos than in other books, and a lot more 'best practices'.

I've taught a lot and I find this book to be of far higher standards than a lot of 'official' material out there developed for closed-source products.

One thing though, this book definitely assumes you've got some programming experience, preferably OO background, so I wouldn't consider it to be a 'beginner book' (to be fair it's not advertised as such). Rails itself is similar to this book - you need to have developed a lot of prior applications to truly appreciate its elegance.

I also recommend you have a look at their website, Pragmatic Programmer, where you can get an electronic copy of the book in PDF and kindle format, well worth it.

great resource for experienced oo programmers
This is a well written book and should get you off to a good start using rails if you are an experienced OO programmer and have a working knowledge of ruby.

A good read for all developers
Not only is this a great introduction to the marvelous Rails framework, it is also an easy read. Technical authors can learn a lot from this book on how to write quality 'how to' books. I'll also say that even if you don't intend to use Ruby and Rails for your web developement, this book is still useful; I use PHP but I've taken a lot of the ideas from this book and applied them my work.