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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 31 Ratings

Time for an update - 2009-03-11
Reviewer Rating:
The Rails community is flourishing, and the technology is evolving quickly. Before too long, Rails 2.3 will be in general release. This book is a solid reference, but its roots are in Rails 1.x, with a couple of scraps tossed in to earn the "Rails 2.0" seal on the cover. As a rails newbie, I got a foundation from this book, but unfortunately, if you try and take this book literally but you are working in rails 2.x, you will get frustrated. There are plenty of resources on the web to help fill this gap. I like having a physical reference, so I'm glad I bought the book, but newbies beware. I would love to see a new edition of this book, thoroughly updated to reflect the current state of rails.

Don't start with this book - 2009-02-06
Reviewer Rating:
From the blurb it might appear that this book is a good way to get into Rails: it is not! When you read the intro in the book itself the author states that the intent of this book is to serve as a reference book for folks who already know Rails; curiously that fact didn't make it into the information used to aid purchasers. Maybe I'll find this book useful if and when I learn Rails; however, the first chapter did not seem very well written, so I don't have high hopes for the rest of the book.

An excellent reference and guide to RoR - 2009-09-12
Reviewer Rating:
Pretty much all the positive aspects of this book have been covered by previous reviewers. As a rails noob with a still a hazy and sketchy understanding of many, many aspects of RoR, this book is exactly what I need. Its great strength is that it gives a detailed account of Rails, great detail in fact running to just over 900 pages. I have found that as I've worked thru other tutorial oriented Rails books, whenever I've been puzzled by some issue, this book has been very useful. Great resource, highly recommended.

Superb book to study when you need greater depth - 2009-07-03
Reviewer Rating:
I'm fairly new to Rails and have worked through the 'skateboard' book by Dave Thomas and several other tutorial style books. With that knowledge, I was able to get started on some real projects working with rails. However, much of the framework still felt too magical and I was constantly surprised when things broke (not good).

The Rails Way is a marvelous book to study after you have some rails experience and need to understand why the framework works like it does, and uncover aspects of rails that aren't commonly mentioned in other books. Honestly, to get the most value, I'd recommend reading this book cover to cover at least once and really study it. There's a lot of great information packed into every page, it is well worth the effort to read it all.

The best reference books for those who already know Rails - 2009-02-16
Reviewer Rating:
This is my most frequently referenced book. Whenever I find myself unsure of how to do something I depend on The Rails Way to remind me. I've been programming with RoR since v1.2 though, so I know how to navigate the material. I noticed the poor reviews here cite it as a bad way to learn RoR from scratch. Well, I agree but in no way does that make it deserving of 1 or 2 stars.

Obie's chapter on ReST is the best and most concise explanation I've read so far. I wasn't able to completely understand ReST until I sat down and focused on that one chapter. Just that section alone made this book worth it for me.

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