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 ActiveRecord, migrations 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 1.2, so you can begin coding immediately with the latest version of Rails.