The Art of Rails®

Chapter 1. Emergence(y) of the New Web

W. Web knew immediately that something was wrong. He had suffered stomach pangs before, but never like this. Stumbling out of the taxi cab and toward the hospital, he mopped the sweat from his brow and pushed his way through the sidewalk traffic.

Inside, everything was a dizzy blur flowing past him—nurses, patients, a police officer, and several computer technicians hitting a computer monitor and mumbling something about the Internet going down.

"I know, I know!" Web thought as he struggled past them for the emergency patient entrance.

Luckily for W. Web, this particular hospital uses a triage system, and when you explain to the nurse at the front desk that you are the Internet, you get bumped to the front of the line. A lot is riding on your health.

As Web lay in his hospital gurney, passing other familiar technologies as the nurse pushed him down the hall, he realized that he had made the right decision to stop ignoring the pangs. It was going to be okay.

This book will make you a better web application developer. And if some of the pundits with crystal balls are to be believed, we're all on the path to becoming web application developers. More specifically, this book will make you a better Ruby on Rails developer. It assumes that you have written code using Ruby on Rails and now you are thirsty to understand how to design with Ruby on Rails and how to master the elements of Ruby that make it so successful.

The web is a strange medium for application ...