Ruby on Rails: Up and Running: Up and Running

by Bruce Tate, Curt Hibbs

Overview

Ruby on Rails is the super-productive new way to develop full-featuredweb applications. With Ruby on Rails, powerful web applications thatonce took weeks or months to develop can now be produced in a matter ofdays. If it sounds too good to be true, it isn't.

If you're like a lot of web developers, you've probably consideredkicking the tires on Rails - the framework of choice for the newgeneration of Web 2.0 developers. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running takes you out for a test drive and shows you just how fastRuby on Rails can go.

This compact guide teaches you the basics of installing and using boththe Ruby scripting language and the Rails framework for the quickdevelopment of web applications. Ruby on Rails: Up andRunning covers just about everything youneed - from making a simple database-backed application toadding elaborate Ajaxian features and all the juicy bits in between.While Rails is praised for its simplicity and speed of development,there are still a few steps to master on the way. More advancedmaterial helps you map data to an imperfect table, traverse complexrelationships, and build custom finders. A section on working with Ajaxand REST shows you how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to sendemails, implement web services, and create dynamic user-centric webpages. The book also explains the essentials of logging to findperformance problems and delves into other performance-optimizingtechniques.

As new web development frameworks go, Ruby on Rails is the talk of thetown. And Ruby on Rails: Up and Running can makesure you're in on the discussion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596554781
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/22/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Bruce Tate is a father, kayaker, author and independent consultant in Austin, Tx. The international speaker worked for 13 years at IBM, in roles ranging from a database systems programmer to Java consultant. He left IBM to work for several startups in roles ranging from director to CTO. He now has his own consulting practice, with emphasis on lightweight development in Ruby and Java, and persistence strategies. He is the author of seven books, including the best selling Bitter series, the Jolt-winning Better, Faster, Lighter Java, and the Spring Developer's Notebook.

Curt Hibbs has always been slightly obsessed with new technologies and tracking technology trends. But he will tell you that this is simply because he is lazy, always looking for new methods and technologies to make his work easier and more productive. This led to his discovery of Ruby in 2001 (when it was still relatively unknown outside of Japan) and to his founding several highly successful Ruby open source projects.

For most of his professional career, which started in the early 1970's, Curt has been a consultant to well-known companies like Hewlett Packard, Intuit, Corel, WordStar, Charles Schwab, Vivendi Universal, and more. He has also been a principal in several startups. Curt now works as a Senior Software Engineer for The Boeing Company in St. Louis.

Table of Contents

Preface; Who Should Read This Book?; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Platforms; Safari® Enabled; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Zero to Sixty: Introducing Rails; 1.1 Rails Strengths; 1.2 Putting Rails into Action; 1.3 Organization; 1.4 The Web Server; 1.5 Creating a Controller; 1.6 Building a View; 1.7 Tying the Controller to the View; 1.8 Under the Hood; 1.9 What's Next?; Chapter 2: Active Record Basics; 2.1 Active Record Basics; 2.2 Introducing Photo Share; 2.3 Schema Migrations; 2.4 Basic Active Record Classes; 2.5 Attributes; 2.6 Complex Classes; 2.7 Behavior; 2.8 Moving Forward; Chapter 3: Active Record Relationships; 3.1 belongs_to; 3.2 has_many; 3.3 has_one; 3.4 What You Haven't Seen; 3.5 Looking Ahead; Chapter 4: Scaffolding; 4.1 Using the Scaffold Method; 4.2 Replacing Scaffolding; 4.3 Generating Scaffolding Code; 4.4 Moving Forward; Chapter 5: Extending Views; 5.1 The Big Picture; 5.2 Seeing Real Photos; 5.3 View Templates; 5.4 Setting the Default Root; 5.5 Stylesheets; 5.6 Hierarchical Categories; 5.7 Styling the Slideshows; Chapter 6: Ajax; 6.1 How Rails Implements Ajax; 6.2 Playing a Slideshow; 6.3 Using Drag-and-Drop to Reorder Slides; 6.4 Drag and Drop Everything (Almost Everything); 6.5 Filtering by Category; Chapter 7: Testing; 7.1 Background; 7.2 Ruby's Test::Unit; 7.3 Testing in Rails; 7.4 Wrapping Up; Appendix A: Installing Rails; 1.1 Windows; 2.1 OS X; 3.1 Linux; Appendix B: Quick Reference; 5.1 General; 5.2 Testing; 5.3 RJS (Ruby JavaScript); 5.4 Active Record; 5.5 Controllers; 5.6 Views; 5.7 Ajax; 5.8 Configuring Your Application; Colophon;

Bruce A. Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, and father of two. In his spare time, he is an independent consultant in Austin, Texas. In 2001, he founded J2Life, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in Java persistence frameworks and lightweight development methods. His customers have included FedEx, Great West Life, TheServerSide, and BEA. He speaks at conferences and Java user's groups around the nation. Before striking out on his own, Bruce spent 13 years at IBM working on database technologies, object-oriented infrastructure, and Java. He was recruited away from IBM to help start the client services practice in an Austin startup called Pervado Systems. He later served a brief stint as CTO of IronGrid, which built nimble Java performance tools. Bruce is the author of five books, including the bestselling "Better, Faster, Lighter Java", "Beyond Java", and "Spring: A Developer's Notebook", all from O'Reilly.

Curt Hibbs is a senior software developer in St. Louis with more than 30 years' experience in platforms, languages, and technologies too numerous to list. With a keen (and always searching) eye for new methods and technologies to make his work easier and more productive, he has become very active in the Ruby development community.

Read his weblog at blog.curthibbs.us.