The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

• Cover Type: Paperback with 912 pages
• Published by: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Edition: 1st Edition November 26, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0321445619
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0321445612
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.2 x 2.2 inches
• Weighs: 3.1 pounds

The expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications

Ruby on Rails strips complexity from the development process, enabling professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value. Now, for the first time, there’s a comprehensive, authoritative guide to building production-quality software with Rails. Pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez and a team of experts illuminate the entire Rails API, along with the Ruby idioms, design approaches, libraries, and plug-ins that make Rails so valuable. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails’ tools and best practices to maximize productivity and build polished applications users will enjoy.

Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails’ key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does– and how to make it behave the way you want it to.

This book will help you

Increase your productivity as a web developer

Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails

Learn what’s new in Rails 2.0

Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec

Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers

Leverage Rails’ support for designing REST-compliant APIs

Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques

Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing

Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping

Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications

Incorporate logins and authentication into your application

Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own

Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer

Choose the right Rails production configurations

Streamline deployment with Capistrano

 

About The Author

Obie Fernandez is a recognized tech industry leader and independent consultant. He has been hacking computers since he got his first Commodore VIC-20 in the eighties, and found himself in the right place and time as a programmer on some of the first Java enterprise projects of the mid-nineties. He moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1998 and gained prominence as lead architect of local startup success MediaOcean. He also founded the Extreme Programming (later Agile Atlanta) User Group and was that group’s president and organizer for several years. In 2004, he made the move back into the enterprise, tackling high-risk, progressive projects for world-renowned consultancy ThoughtWorks. He has been evangelizing Ruby and Rails online via blog posts and publications since early 2005, and earned himself quite a bit of notoriety (and trash talking) from his old friends in the Java open-source community. Since then, he has presented on a regular basis at numerous industry events and user group meetings, and even does the occasional training gig for corporations and groups wanting to get into Rails development. Nowadays, Obie specializes in the development and marketing of large-scale, web-based applications. 

 

Reader Reviews
I've been waiting for this book since the Sample chapter on activeRecord was released. I suspected this book would answer all the people decrying Rails lack of (java or PHP-like) docs. Well, it is breathtaking in its scope (really), it is the definitive working dev's reference to the APIs, development, testing and deployment best practices and most widely adopted/tested plugins and gems (with a few holes). I believe every dev should go thru the table of contents slowly and carefully (several times). Obie F seems to have assembled a huge team of resources to collaborate on each chapter, and it shows in exhaustive coverage. The table of contents entry for the testing chapter is 2 1/2 pages long and rspec is separate from that. So when i hit a problem, i think i'll hit this book first, then google rails mailing lists, and the intarweb tubes. Negatives (cause I'm looking for perfection): - footnotes are clustered at each chapter's end. Good luck finding a superscript number in a 75-page chapter. -typesetting needs work. It doesn't clearly convey a hierarchy of topics, subtopics, and sub-subtopics , there's just lot of serif, non-serif, bold, italics and sizes on pages that walk through APIs (ajax, ActiveSupport chapters). Better to use outline-style numbering (e.g. Pragmatics). p. 229: the code example mixes an opening single-quote and backticks. Bad, bad. - a number of what could be considered core topics are not covered: search/indexing libraries (ferret, solr, sphinx), HAML/SASS, pinging and site stats libs like mint, god, AWStats, etc. Postgres (this is a biggie), they recommend deploying to Mysql and Redhat/Centos/Debian /gentoo without much detail. textmate/vim/emacs/eclipse. source control libs like darcs and git. Rspec *is* given thirty pages, this is big. (There's not room for detailed discussion, but they could have mentioned these things ina sentence somewhere. most of these topics are covered in detail somewhere in blogspace, except for ferret/solr/sphinx deployment strategies, where you have to read mailing list archives. - rails is on cusp of widespread adoption of release 2. I haven't seen anywhere that AW or Safari online books plans to issue regular PDF or online updates to the book. This is the main criticism if it is correct, relative to how Pragmatic has been releasing its books.