Ruby on Rails™ 3 Tutorial: Learn Rails™ by Example

Chapter 12. Following Users

In this chapter, we will complete the core 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 will also make views to display both a user’s followers and the users each user is following. We will learn how to model user following in Section 12.1, and then make the web interface in Section 12.2 (including an introduction to Ajax). Finally, 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 a complicated data model and some Ruby/SQL trickery to make the status ...