Ruby on Rails Programming Notes, Links and other Goodies

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.

Ruby on Rails is the super-productive new way to develop full-featured web applications. With Ruby on Rails, powerful web applications that once took weeks or months to develop can now be produced in a matter of days. If it sounds too good to be true, it isn't.

If you're like a lot of web developers, you've probably considered kicking the tires on Rails - the framework of choice for the new generation of Web 2.0 developers. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running takes you out for a test drive and shows you just how fast Ruby on Rails can go.

Rails Cookbook is packed with the solutions you need to be a proficient developer with Rails, the leading framework for building the new generation of Web 2.0 applications. Recipes range from the basics, like installing Rails and setting up your development environment, to the latest techniques, such as developing RESTful web services.

Ready to go to the next level with Rails? From examining the parts of Ruby that make this framework possible to deploying large Rails applications, Advanced Rails offers you an in-depth look at techniques for dealing with databases, security, performance, web services and much more. Chapters in this book help you understand not only the tricks and techniques used within the Rails framework itself, but also how to make use of ideas borrowed from other programming paradigms. Advanced Rails pays particular attention to building applications that scale — whether "scale" means handling more users, or working with a bigger and more complex database. You'll find plenty of examples and code samples that explain: Aspects of Ruby that are often confusing or misunderstood Metaprogramming How to develop Rails plug-ins Different database management systems Advanced database features, including triggers, rules, and stored procedures How to connect to multiple databases When to use the Active Support library for generic, reusable functions Security principles for web application design, and security issues endemic to the Web When and when not to optimize performance Why version control and issue tracking systems are essential to any large or long-lived Rails project Advanced Rails also gives you a look at REST for developing web services, ways to incorporate and extend Rails, how to use internationalization, and many other topics. If you're just starting out with rails, or merely experimenting with the framework, this book is not for you. But if you want to improve your skills with Rails through advanced techniques, this book is essential.

Want to learn all about Ruby on Rails 2.0, the web application framework that is inspiring developers around the world?

The 2nd edition of this practical hands-on guide for first-time Ruby on Rails programmers will walk you through installing the required software on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer. And before you get coding, an entire chapter is devoted to object oriented programming in Ruby, so you'll be completely confident with the Ruby language before you begin working with Rails.

The example application that the book builds - a user-generated news web site - is built upon with each following chapter, and concepts such as sessions, cookies and basic AJAX usage are gradually introduced. Different aspects of Rails, such as user authentication, session cookies, and automated testing are explored with each feature that is added to the application.

The book finishes with chapters on debugging, benchmarking and deployment to a live web server.

By the end of the book, you'll have built a fully-featured Web 2.0 application and deployed it to the Web. And all code is up-to-date for Rails 2.0, so you can begin coding immediately with the latest version of Rails.

Beginning Rails is the practical starting point for anyone wanting to learn how to build dynamic web applications using the Rails framework for Ruby. You’ll learn how all of the components of Rails fit together and how you can leverage them to create sophisticated web applications with less code and more joy.

This book is particularly well suited to those with little or no experience with web application development, or who have some experience but are new to Rails. Beginning Rails assumes basic familiarity with web terms and technologies, but doesn't require you to be an expert.