Learning Rails

Chapter 19. Making the Most of Rails—And Beyond

At this point, Rails should seem much less mysterious. You should understand how to build fairly sophisticated Rails applications, the magic of assembling applications by naming convention, and the challenges involved in deploying an application. As much as you’ve learned, though, there’s much farther that you could go.

Keep Up with Rails

Rails 2.1 was the latest and greatest when this book was written, but Rails continues to evolve. An easy way to keep an eye on Rails is to visit Riding Rails, the website for core Rails development announcements, at http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/. Their “This Week in Rails” series catalogs new Rails articles and software releases, while “Living on the Edge” explores what’s coming (and sometimes going) in Edge Rails, the cutting-edge version of Rails that occasionally turns into the next release.

If you’d like to talk rather than read, the #rubyonrails IRC channel on http://irc.freenode.net is usually busy. You can find more information and logs of past conversations at http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/IRC. In email, the rubyonrails-talk list on http://googlegroups.com churns through 100 or more messages a day, at all levels of difficulty.

Screencasts and podcasts are another good way to learn more about Rails. You can find free tutorial screencasts at http://railscasts.com/, for example, or screencasts for a fee (usually $9.00) at http://peepcode.com/. To keep up with Rails ongoing evolution, you ...