Ruby on Rails: Up and Running

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 from O'Reilly 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.

Preface

1. Zero to Sixty: Introducing Rails

     Rails Strengths

     Putting Rails into Action

     Organization

     The Web Server

     Creating a Controller

     Building a View

     Tying the Controller to the View

     Under the Hood

     What's Next?

2. Active Record Basics

     Active Record Basics

     Introducing Photo Share

     Schema Migrations

     Basic Active Record Classes

     Attributes

     Complex Classes

     Behavior

     Moving Forward

3. Active Record Relationships

     belongs_to

     has_many

     has_one

     What You Haven't Seen

     Looking Ahead

4. Scaffolding

     Using the Scaffold Method

     Replacing Scaffolding

     Generating Scaffolding Code

     Moving Forward

5. Extending Views

     The Big Picture

     Seeing Real Photos

     View Templates

     Setting the Default Root

     Stylesheets

     Hierarchical Categories

     Styling the Slideshows

6. Ajax

     How Rails Implements Ajax

     Playing a Slideshow

     Using Drag-and-Drop to Reorder Slides

     Drag and Drop Everything (Almost Everything)

     Filtering by Category

7. Testing

     Background

     Ruby's Test::Unit

     Testing in Rails

     Wrapping Up

A. Installing Rails

B. Quick Reference

Index