Chapter 1. From Zero to Deploy

Welcome to Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example. The goal of this book is to be the best and most up-to-date answer to the question, “If I want to learn web development with Ruby on Rails, where should I start?”^[1] Although the Ruby on Rails web framework benefits from a wealth of learning resources—including books, blogs, and screencasts—many of them assume a substantial background in Rails. Ruby on Rails Tutorial is designed to give you this background. By the time you finish this book, you will have a solid foundation in Rails programming, ready to benefit from more advanced Rails resources.

^[1] The most up-to-date version of Ruby on Rails Tutorial can be found on the book’s website at http://www.railstutorial.org/. If you are reading this book offline, be sure to check the Rails Tutorial website for the latest updates.

Ruby on Rails Tutorial follows essentially the same approach as my previous Rails book,^[2] teaching web development with Rails by building a sample application from scratch. This allows you to see the many different pieces of Ruby on Rails in context, motivated by real problems, as well as how those pieces fit together. Moreover, although Rails is a large and fast-moving framework, in Ruby on Rails Tutorial we’ll focus on the smaller, more stable set of core Rails techniques that have crystallized in the last couple years, so the knowledge you gain here will not soon be obsolete. We’ll also take care not to rely on the generated code called scaffolding (Box 1.1), so that the Rails knowledge you gain will be adaptable to new problems.

^[2] RailsSpace, by Michael Hartl and Aurelius Prochazka (Addison-Wesley, 2007).