Summary

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 2.1 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 2.0 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.

Author Biography

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 four books, including the bestselling "Bitter Java", and the recently released Better, Faster, Lighter Java, from O'Reilly. First rule of kayak: When in doubt, paddle like Hell.

Lance Carlson has been programming Ruby since Rails version 0.13 was released, and he has been riding on its coattails since. He currently owns Ruby Skills, a Ruby consultancy firm and is working for Engine Yard as an application support engineer. Lance has contributed to various Ruby open source projects such as Merb, Rails, DataMapper, and he is also the creator of Ruby Anvil.

Curt Hibbs has always been slightly obsessed with new technologies and tracking technology trends. But he will tell you that this is simply because he is lazy, always looking for new methods and technologies to make his work easier and more productive. This led to his discovery of Ruby in 2001 (when it was still relatively unknown outside of Japan) and to his founding several highly successful Ruby open source projects.

For most of his professional career, which started in the early 1970's, Curt has been a consultant to well-known companies like Hewlett Packard, Intuit, Corel, WordStar, Charles Schwab, Vivendi Universal, and more. He has also been a principal in several startups. Curt now works as a Senior Software Engineer for The Boeing Company in St. Louis.

Preface
Who Should Read This Book?
Conventions Used in This Book
Using Code Examples
Platforms
SafariÂ“ Books Online
How to Contact Us
Acknowledgments
Zero to Sixty: Introducing Rails
Putting Rails into Action
Organization
The Web Server
Creating a Controller
Building a View
Tying Controller Data to the View
Under the Hood
WhatâÇÖs Next?
Scaffolding, REST, and Routes
Introducing Photo Share
Preparing Your Project and Database
Generating a Resource Scaffold
RESTful Routes
Wrapping Up the Scaffolding
WhatâÇÖs Next?
Active Record Basics
Active Record Basics
Generating Models
Basic Active Record Classes
Attributes
Complex Classes
Behavior
Moving Forward
Active Record Relationships
belongs_to
has_many
has_one
has_and_belongs_to_many
acts_as_list
Trees
What You HavenâÇÖt Seen
Looking Ahead
Working with Views
The Big Picture
Seeing Real Photos
View Templates
Setting the Default Root
Stylesheets
Hierarchical Categories
Styling the Slideshows
Ajax
How Rails Implements Ajax
Playing a Slideshow
Using Drag-and-Drop to Reorder Slides
Drag-and-Drop Everything (Almost Everything)
Filtering by Category
Testing
Background
RubyâÇÖs Test::Unit
Testing in Rails
Test Coverage
Mocking with Mocha
Assertions and Integration Tests
Wrapping Up
Installing Rails
Windows
OS X
Linux
Quick Reference
General
Testing
RJS (Ruby JavaScript)
Active Record
Controllers
Views
Ajax
Configuring Your Application
Colophon
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

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