Ruby on Rails™ Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails, Fourth Edition

Chapter 14. Following Users

In this chapter, we will complete the Rails Tutorial 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 14.1, and we’ll build the corresponding web interface in Section 14.2 (including an introduction to Ajax). We’ll end by developing a fully functional status feed in Section 14.3.

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 ...