Advanced Rails

Preface

When I started working with Ruby and Rails in late 2004, there was almost no documentation on the Rails framework. Since then, there has been a tremendous number of books, blogs, and articles written about creating web applications with Rails. But many of them seemed to follow a common pattern: you could create a blog in 15 minutes; a to-do list application was simple. Many of the books I saw devoted an entire chapter to installing Ruby and Rails. Today, there is no lack of resources for the beginning and intermediate Rails developer.

But Rails is clearly useful for much more than toy blogs and to-do lists. The 37signals applications (Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire) are all built with Rails; many of the Internet’s high-traffic sites such as Twitter, Penny Arcade, and Yellowpages.com use it. Rails is now used in many high-profile places, yet developers often have to fend for themselves when building such large applications, as the most current and relevant information is often only found spread across various other developers’ blogs.

Development and deployment of complex web projects is a multidisciplinary task, and it will always remain so. In this book, I seek to weave together several different topics relevant to Rails development, from the most basic foundations of the Ruby programming language to the development of large Rails applications.

Prerequisites

As its title suggests, Advanced Rails is not a book for beginners. Readers should have an understanding of ...