Product Description

The expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications

Ruby on Rails strips complexity from the development process, enabling professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value. Now, for the first time, there’s a comprehensive, authoritative guide to building production-quality software with Rails. Pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez and a team of experts illuminate the entire Rails API, along with the Ruby idioms, design approaches, libraries, and plug-ins that make Rails so valuable. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails’ tools and best practices to maximize productivity and build polished applications users will enjoy.

Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails’ key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does– and how to make it behave the way you want it to.

This book will help you

Increase your productivity as a web developer

Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails

Learn what’s new in Rails 2.0

Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec

Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers

Leverage Rails’ support for designing REST-compliant APIs

Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques

Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing

Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping

Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications

Incorporate logins and authentication into your application

Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own

Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer

Choose the right Rails production configurations

Streamline deployment with Capistrano

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #253168 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 912 pages

From the Back Cover

The expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications

Ruby on Rails strips complexity from the development process, enabling professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value. Now, for the first time, there’s a comprehensive, authoritative guide to building production-quality software with Rails. Pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez and a team of experts illuminate the entire Rails API, along with the Ruby idioms, design approaches, libraries, and plug-ins that make Rails so valuable. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails’ tools and best practices to maximize productivity and build polished applications users will enjoy.

Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails’ key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does– and how to make it behave the way you want it to.

This book will help you

Increase your productivity as a web developer

Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails

Learn what’s new in Rails 2.0

Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec

Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers

Leverage Rails’ support for designing REST-compliant APIs

Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques

Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing

Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping

Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications

Incorporate logins and authentication into your application

Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own

Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer

Choose the right Rails production configurations

Streamline deployment with Capistrano

About the Author

Obie Fernandez is a recognized tech industry leader and independent consultant. He has been hacking computers since he got his first Commodore VIC-20 in the eighties, and found himself in the right place and time as a programmer on some of the first Java enterprise projects of the mid-nineties. He moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1998 and gained prominence as lead architect of local startup success MediaOcean. He also founded the Extreme Programming (later Agile Atlanta) User Group and was that group’s president and organizer for several years. In 2004, he made the move back into the enterprise, tackling high-risk, progressive projects for world-renowned consultancy ThoughtWorks. He has been evangelizing Ruby and Rails online via blog posts and publications since early 2005, and earned himself quite a bit of notoriety (and trash talking) from his old friends in the Java open-source community. Since then, he has presented on a regular basis at numerous industry events and user group meetings, and even does the occasional training gig for corporations and groups wanting to get into Rails development. Nowadays, Obie specializes in the development and marketing of large-scale, web-based applications. 

Customer Reviews

A Must for Serious Rails Developers
At over 900 pages this is a Rails How-to on a biblical scale. Clearly written by someone who has got their hand dirty in lots of real world Rails applications the book offers detailed and well targeted advice. There are other books out there for getting started with Rails but once you're up and running this is the book you need by your side.

Pragmatic use of Rails is about using great plug-ins and making use of all the framework has to offer this book helps you discover the full extent of what Rails has to offer so you can spend less time coding and more time reusing.

This book is my bible.
If you are serious about developing using Ruby on Rails: buy this book. There is no doubt it will come in useful, even if you consider yourself an advanced RoR developer. I was very comfortable with RoR before I read this book, expecting to only find a few bits and pieces useful, but the level of detail is really great, explaining exactly how each line works, helps both novices and expects alike.

If you want to learn by example, this book might not suit you, as it is more of a reference book than a step by step guide. What it will give you however is a great, deep knowledge of Rails allowing you to 'invent' your own examples along the way. My advice to novices: choose yourself a basic project to begin with (e.g. make a address book system with login), and then read the book with the idea of "how do I do this best?", make notes, then when you feel confident - put all the pieces of your system together.

My summary:
This is the only RoR book I have read that goes beyond the information you can find on the internet and is actually worth buying. You will not be let down. You will refer to it all the time.

The author does not know which audience he is aiming at.
This book is hard to use as a reference. It is not concise and walks you through examples like a baby. I had to read this book from cover to cover to find the gems... If your a beginner in ruby/rails, have created a basic rails application, have the time to work through 900 pages and don't mind fluff, then this is a good book. However, there may be short sections throughout the book that might go over your head, but you can always come back to those sections later... The chapter on REST was really useful for me.