Foundation Rails 2

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxvii

   PDF

2. Why Rails?

   Pages 1-11

3. A Short Introduction to Ruby

   Pages 13-43

4. Touring a Rails Application

   Pages 45-64

5. Introducing Activerecord

   Pages 67-113

6. Advanced Activerecord

   Pages 115-137

7. Presenting the Views

   Pages 139-169

8. Exploring Action Pack: Understanding the Controller

   Pages 171-202

9. Controlling Our Routing

   Pages 205-222

10. Scaffolding and Plug-Ins

    Pages 225-250

11. Introduction to Testing with Rspec

    Pages 253-289

12. Building a Complete Application

    Pages 291-337

13. Enhancing Our Application

    Pages 339-378

14. Security and Performance Enhancements

    Pages 381-399

15. Deploying Your Rails Application

    Pages 401-413

16. Back Matter

    Pages 415-451

    PDF

You've heard about this amazing web framework called Ruby on Rails that's taken the world by storm, but thought it was way too complex for you? Think again.

Foundation Rails 2 takes you through your first steps in Rails, explaining in plain English how to start building dynamic web applications. And there's never been a better time to jump in to the Rails world, as the release of Rails 2 was a major evolutionary leap forward from previous versions.

Unlike other Rails books, this book doesn't throw you into the deep end right away in the hopes that you'll learn to swim. Instead, we'll start out with the basics and continually expand your knowledge until, by the end of the book, we're building a Rails application with dynamic features such as user registration, geocoding, filtering results with AJAX, RSS feeds, and an XML interface. Meanwhile, we'll talk about the important issues that other books often leave out such as testing your application's code, securing your application from hackers, optimizing your code for the best performance, and of course, deploying your application.

This book takes a focused approach to guiding you through understanding how the pieces of Rails work individually and how they fit together. Instead of emphasizing boring theoretical discussions, Foundation Rails 2 lets you get your hands dirty with the framework and learn the hows and whys of Rails faster than ever.

We start with a tour of what makes Rails special and why you need to learn it, move into a gentle introduction to the high points of programming in Ruby, and then take a tour of a sample Rails application. Next, we dig deeper into the core components of Rails before building a complete Rails application together. By the end of this book, not only will you know how to build Rails applications but you'll understand the reasons behind what you do.

• RSS feed
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• XML
• control
• framework
• performance
• programming
• time

Eldon Alameda is a web developer who currently resides in the harsh climates of Kansas. He works as a regional webmaster for the U.S. National Weather Service; prior to this, he did development for a variety of companies including local start-ups, advertising firms, Sprint PCS, and IBM. During the 1990s, he also acquired a nice stack of worthless stock options from working for dot-com companies.

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