Beginning Rails 3

Chapter 4. Working with a Database: Active Record

In the previous chapter, you took a whirlwind tour through creating a basic Rails application using the built-in scaffolding feature. You sketched out a basic model for a blog application and created the project databases. You used the built-in web server to run the application locally and practiced adding and managing articles from the web browser. In this chapter, you take a more in-depth look at how things work, starting with what is arguably the most important part of Rails: Active Record.

You may recall from Chapter 1 that Active Record is the Ruby object-relational mapping library that handles database abstraction and interaction for Rails. Whether you realized it or not, in the previous ...