Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails, Third Edition

Chapter 12. Following Users

In this chapter, we will complete the sample application by adding a social layer that allows users to follow (and unfollow) other users, resulting in each user’s Home page displaying a status feed of the followed users’ microposts. We’ll start by learning how to model relationships between users in Section 12.1, and we’ll build the corresponding web interface in Section 12.2 (including an introduction to Ajax). We’ll end by developing a fully functional status feed in Section 12.3.

This final chapter contains some of the most challenging material in the tutorial, including some Ruby/SQL trickery to make the status feed. Through these examples, you will see how Rails can handle even rather intricate data models, which ...