Enterprise Rails

What to Expect in This Book

If you are new to Rails, the first book to read is Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas et al. (Pragmatic Bookshelf). The book you have in your hands, by contrast, is not a how-to guide for writing your first Rails application. This should be the second book you read.

This book deals in larger concepts, the formulas for how pieces fit together. It is not a compendium of the Rails API or a reference of the Ruby programming language. Books on these topics exist, and they are good to keep on your bookshelf, but they contain descriptions of tools rather than a formula for putting those tools together to get your job done.

This book gives you the tools to develop applications for the enterprise world for websites with global scale. Scaling comes in two forms. The first is the scaling we traditionally think of in terms of handling thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of users, typified by Twitter and other large scale websites like Google, Amazon, or eBay. The second type of scaling is a more practical, human-focused concern. As your business needs change or expand, and as the types of developers in your organization and their quantities increase, will each developer still have the ability to contribute to the product in a meaningful way? Can new features be added easily and in parallel without conflict, or is the application difficult to modify by multiple developers at once? Will you be able to harness the hard work of the past in building ...