Rails: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Preface

The Rails phenomenon is sweeping through our industry with reckless disregard for established programming languages, long-standing conventions, or commercial support. You can get a whole lot of information about Rails from articles on the Web, excellent books, and even formal course work. However, there’s something missing: how does an established programmer—armed with nothing more than a little Ruby knowledge—go just beyond the basics and be productive in Rails?

With Rails: Up and Running, Second Edition, we are not going to reiterate the reference manual or replace Google. Instead, we’ll strive to give you the big picture of how Rails applications hold together and tell you where to go for the information that we don’t cover in the chapters. We’ll take you just beneath the covers of Active Record, the Rails framework that gives Ruby objects a database backing. You’ll get just deep enough to understand the “magic” features that perplex most Rails newbies. By understanding the big picture, you’ll be able to make better use of the best reference manuals to fill in the details.

We won’t try to make you digest a whole lot of words. Rather, we’ll give you the theory in the context of an end-to-end application. We’ll walk you through the creation of a simple project—one that is a little more demanding than a blog or shopping cart, but with a simple enough structure that a Rails beginner will be able to quickly understand what’s going on. In short, we’re going to let the code do ...