The definitive, Jolt-award winning guide to learning and using Rails is now in its Second Edition. Rails is a new approach to web-based application development that enables developers to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications using less code and less effort. Now programmers can get the job done right and still leave work on time.
NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION: The book has been updated to take advantage of all the new Rails 1.2 features. The sample application uses migrations, Ajax, features a REST interface, and illustrates new Rails features. There are new chapters on migrations, active support, active record, and action controller (including the new resources-based routing). The Web 2.0 and Deployment chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect the latest thinking. Now you can learn which environments are best for your style application, and see how Capistrano makes managing your site simple. All the remaining chapters have been extensively updated. Finally, hundreds of comments from readers of the first edition have been incorporated, making this book simply the best available.
Rails is a full-stack, open source web framework that enables you to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications with a twist...you can create a full Rails application using less code than the setup XML you'd need just to configure some other frameworks.
With this book, you'll learn how to use Rails Active Record to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. 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, talk to web services, and interact dynamically with JavaScript applications running in the browser (the "Ajax" architecture).
You'll see how easy it is to deploy Rails. You'll be writing applications that work with your favorite database (MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and more) in no time at all.
Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt have more than 50 years combined experience, developing software for clients around the world. For the last 10 years they've been working together as The Pragmatic Programmers, helping clients write software and improve their development processes. They are authors of the best-selling The Pragmatic Programmer, and have written several other books. They speak at conferences globally, and are editors of IEEE Software's "Construction" column. Mike Clark is a consultant, author, speaker, and programmer. He is the author of Pragmatic Project Automation (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2004), editor of PragmaticAutomation.com, a frequent speaker at software development conferences, and the creator of several popular open source tools. Mike helps teams build better software faster through his company, Clarkware Consulting. James Duncan Davidson is a photographer, author, and software developer living in Portland, Oregon. He is the co-author of O'Reilly's Running Mac OS X Tiger and a contributor to Mac OS X Hacks, among others. He is perhaps best known for his work on Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant, both open source software projects created during his tenure at Sun Microsystems. More recently, he's been working on lots of Ruby on Rails based websites and Objective-C based Cocoa applications. Since 2005, he has been the photographer for all the conferences produced by O'Reilly Media. Working as a professional programmer, instructor, speaker and pundit since 1992, Justin Gehtland has developed real-world applications using VB, COM, .NET, Java, Perl and a slew of obscure technologies since relegated to the trash heap of technical history. His focus has historically been on "connected" applications, which of course has led him down the COM+, ASP/ASP.NET and JSP roads.Justin is the co-author of Effective Visual Basic (Addison Wesley, 2001) and Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET (Addison Wesley, 2003). He is currently the regular Agility columnist on The Server Side .NET, and works as a consultant through his company Relevance, LLC in addition to teaching for DevelopMentor.
