Professional Ruby on Rails™

Introduction

First released to the public in 2004 after being developed to support the Basecamp project management application, Ruby on Rails promised nothing less than a revolution in the way web applications are constructed. With a strong grounding in the pragmatic ethic of avoiding repetition, the Rails way of supporting common conventions instead of complex options showed that there was a simpler way to build for the Web, and "my code is shorter than your configuration file" became the boast of the day.

In the intervening years. Rails has made friends and enemies, has been used to build some of the hottest web applications going, and has undergone several internal revolutions as the notion of what comprises Rails best practices continues to evolve. This book attempts to use the current best practices to show how to build a web application.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is intended for intermediate to advanced Rails programmers. It assumes that you already know Ruby, and have either read one of the many wonderful introductory books on Rails or have otherwise consumed some form of a Rails tutorial. In either case, you don't need me to tell you how to create a basic Rails application.

The focus of this book is on the step that comes after just being able to make Rails work. You've read the basic book, and now you've been asked to implement a real, live, web application. Suddenly you have all sorts of questions that weren't covered in the introductory material. How do I ...