The Rails 4 Way

by Fernandez, Obie; Faustino, Kevin

• ISBN13: 9780321944276
• ISBN10: 0321944275
• Edition: 3rd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-05-29
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Summary

The “Bible” for Rails Development: Now Fully Updated for Rails 4.1

 

"When I read The Rails Way for the first time, I felt like I truly understood Rails for the first time.”

—From the Foreword by Steve Klabnik

 

Ruby on Rails 4 is leaner, tighter, and even more valuable to professional web developers. More than ever, it helps you focus on what matters most: delivering business value via clean and maintainable code.

 

The Rails™ 4 Way is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to delivering production-quality code with Rails 4. Kevin Faustino joins pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez to illuminate the entire Rails 4 API, including its most powerful and modern idioms, design approaches, and libraries. They present extensive new and updated content on security, performance, caching, Haml, RSpec, Ajax, the Asset Pipeline, and more.

 

Through detailed code examples, you’ll dive deep into the Rails 4 code base, discover why Rails is designed as it is, and learn how to make it do exactly what you want. Proven in dozens of production systems, this book’s techniques will maximize your productivity and help you build more successful solutions. You’ll want to keep this guide by your computer—you’ll refer to it constantly.

 

This guide will help you

• Build powerful, scalable REST-compliant APIs
• Program complex program flows using Action Controller
• Represent models, relationships, CRUD operations, searches, validation, callbacks, and more
• Smoothly evolve application database schema via Migrations
• Apply advanced Active Record techniques: single-table inheritance, polymorphic models, and more
• Create visual elements with Action View and partials
• Optimize performance and scalability with view caching
• Master the highly productive Haml HTML templating engine
• Make the most of Rails’ approach to session management
• Secure your systems with Rails 4’s improved authentication and authorization
• Resist SQL Injection, XSS, XSRF, and other attacks
• Extend Rails with popular gems and plugins, and learn to write your own
• Integrate email services with Action Mailer
• Use Ajax via Rails 4 support for unobtrusive JavaScript
• Improve responsiveness with background processing
• Leverage Asset Pipeline to simplify development, improve perceived performance, and reduce server burdens
• Accelerate implementation and promote maintainability with RSpec

Author Biography

Obie Fernandez 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. In 1998, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where is still resides, 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.

As founder of Hashrocket, one of the world’s best web design and development consultancies, Obie specialized in orchestrating the creation of large-scale, web-based applications, both for startups and mission-critical enterprise projects. In 2010, Obie sold his stake in Hashrocket and has been working with technology startups ever since.

Obie's evangelization of Ruby on Rails online, via blog posts and publications, dates to early 2005, and it has earned him quite a bit of notoriety (and trash talking) from his old friends in the Java open-source community. Since then, he has traveled around the world relentlessly promoting Rails at large industry conferences. The previous two editions of this book are considered the "bibles" of Ruby on Rails development and are bestsellers.

Obie still gets his hands dirty with code on a daily basis and posts regularly on various topics to his popular weblog at <http://blog.obiefernandez.com>

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 Rails Environments and Configuration
2 Routing
3 REST, Resources, and Rails
4 Working with Controllers
5 Working with Active Record
6 Active Record Migrations
7 Active Record Associations
8 Validations
9 Advanced Active Record
10 Action View
11 All About Helpers
12 Ajax on Rails  
13 Session Management
14 Authentication and Authorization
15 Security
16 Action Mailer
17 Caching and Performance
18 RSpec
19 Extending Rails with Plugins
20 Background Processing
21 XML and Active Resource
Appendixes
Active Model API Reference
Active Support API Reference
Rails Essentials
Theadsafe