Agile Web Development with Rails 3.2 (Pragmatic Programmers)

Ruby on Rails helps you produce high-quality, beautiful-looking web applications quickly. You concentrate on creating the application, and Rails takes care of the details. Tens of thousands of developers have used this award-winning book to learn Rails. It's a broad, far-reaching tutorial and reference that's recommended by the Rails core team. If you're new to Rails, you'll get step-by-step guidance. If you're an experienced developer, this book will give you the comprehensive, insider information you need. Rails has evolved over the years, and this book has evolved along with it. We still start with a step-by-step walkthrough of building a real application, and in-depth chapters look at the built-in Rails features. This edition now gives new Ruby and Rails users more information on the Ruby language and takes more time to explain key concepts throughout. Best practices on how to apply Rails continue to change, and this edition keeps up. Examples use cookie backed sessions, HTTP authentication, and Active Record-based forms, and the book focuses throughout on the right way to use Rails. Additionally, this edition now reflects Ruby 1.9, a new release of Ruby with substantial functional and performance improvements.

You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management.

But Rails is more than a set of best practices. Rails makes it both fun and easy to turn out very cool web applications. Need Ajax support, so your web applications are highly interactive? Rails has it built in. Want an application that sends and receives e-mail? Built in. Supports internationalization and localization? Built in. Do you need applications with a REST-based interface (so they can interact with other RESTful applications with almost no effort on your part)? All built-in.

With this book, you'll learn how to use ActiveRecord to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. Need to create and modify your schema? Migrations make it painless (and they're versioned, so you can roll changes backward and forward). You'll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic, user-centric web-pages using built-in Javascript and Ajax support. There is extensive coverage of testing, and the rewritten Deployment chapter now covers Phusion Passenger.

As with the previous editions of the book, we start with an extended tutorial that builds parts of an online store. And, of course, the application has been rewritten to show the best of Rails V2.

Rails just keeps on changing. Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9 bring hundreds of improvements, including new APIs and substantial performance enhancements. The fourth edition of this award-winning classic has been reorganized and refocused so it’s more useful than ever before for developers new to Ruby and Rails.Rails 3 is a major release—the changes aren’t just incremental, but structural. So we decided to follow suit. This book isn’t just a mild reworking of the previous edition to make it run with the new Rails. Instead, it’s a complete refactoring.You’ll still find the Depot example at the front, but you’ll also find testing knitted right in. Gone are the long reference chapters—that’s what the web does best. Instead you’ll find more targeted information on all the aspects of Rails that you’ll need to be a successful Web developer. Provides information on creating Web-based applications with Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9, covering such topics as HTTP authentication, validation and unit testing, cart creation, Ajax, caching, migrations, and plugins