Ruby on Rails: Up and Running

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 182 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc. August 22, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0596101325
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596101329
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 11.2 ounces

Product Description
Ruby on Rails is the super-productive new way to develop full-featured web applications. With Ruby on Rails, powerful web applications that once took weeks or months to develop can now be produced in a matter of days. If it sounds too good to be true, it isn't.

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

This compact guide teaches you the basics of installing and using both the Ruby scripting language and the Rails framework for the quick development of web applications. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running covers just about everything you need - from making a simple database-backed application to adding 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 advanced material helps you map data to an imperfect table, traverse complex relationships, and build custom finders. A section on working with Ajax and REST shows you how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic user-centric web pages. The book also explains the essentials of logging to find performance problems and delves into other performance-optimizing techniques.

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

About The Author
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 thirty 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.

Reader Reviews
Given that this book is only 127 pages long without the Appendix, it's a pretty pricey little item. I liked the content of the book, and certainly learned a lot about how to bring up a Rails application, but a $29.99 retail price seems exorbitant. In this first edition there are also plenty of typos and some errors in the example code (VERY frustrating). Luckily the corrected source code can be downloaded from O'Reilly free. I would have given this item 4 or 5 stars if it would have been half the price. Alternatively, this little book would make a great introduction to a more comprehensive book on Rails. Stand-alone, it feels like a rip-off.