As a PHP developer, you have some great tools for developing web applications. Ruby on Rails is another key tool to add to your web development toolbox. Rails is a high-level web development framework that emphasizes high productivity and clean code. However, the Ruby language and Rails framework take a different approach from the way many PHP developers write applications.
Ruby lies at the foundation of Rails, and we'll teach you the Ruby language from the beginning by building on your existing foundation of PHP. We'll explore Ruby through parallel code examples that illustrate the differences between the languages, and help you understand the Ruby idioms and how they differ from popular PHP code and style.
You'll then learn the Rails framework by iteratively building a complete application, starting from the home page through to a finished product. Along the way, you'll build your skills as a Rails developer by learning the Rails fundamentals such as MVC structure, domain modeling, and testing.
In addition to serving as a guide to learning both Ruby and Rails from a PHP developer's perspective, this book includes two extensive reference chapters. They map the most common PHP tasks to their equivalents in the Ruby and Rails world, giving you at-a-glance information that you'll refer to often.
About the Author
Derek DeVries has an education in fine arts and a strong background as a web application developer. As vice president of design for Maintainable Software, Derek leads design, branding, and user experience for the company. He is also a Zend Certified PHP Engineer with over five years experience leading PHP development teams at Xerox, Amici LLC, and several startup companies. Derek has worked on a number of Ruby on Rails products in his current position and in his spare time develops SportSpyder.com, a Rails application for finding the best new sports articles on the web. Mike Naberezny is the founder of Maintainable Software, a software development company in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has over ten years software engineering experience working with companies such as Flextronics and Instrumentation Engineering. Mike's PHP experience includes holding a senior position at Zend Technologies, and he sits on the Zend PHP Education Advisory Board. Mike heads engineering at Maintainable, where he has developed and deployed a number of Rails applications. He is a regular speaker at software conferences and contributes to several open source projects.
