Ruby on Rails has shaken up the web development industry in a huge way—especially when you consider that version 1.0 of Rails was only released in December 2005. The huge waves of enthusiasm for the new framework, originally in weblogs and later in the more traditional media, are probably the reason why this book is in your hands.
This book will lead you through the components that make up the Rails framework by building a clone of the popular story-sharing web site digg.com. This will give you a chance to get your feet wet building a simple, yet comprehensive web application using Ruby on Rails.
Does this book cover Ajax? Absolutely! Rails has tight integration with the latest web technologies including Ajax, as well as pretty animations, and features such as auto-completion and in-line editing. If that’s all Greek to you, don’t worry. I’ll get you started, and by the time you finish this book, you’ll be able to discuss all things Web 2.0 with your friends and coworkers, and impress your grandparents with geeky vocabulary.
Want to learn all about Ruby on Rails, the web application framework that is inspiring developers around the world?
This practical hands-on guide for first-time Ruby on Rails programmers will walk you through installing the required software on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer. And before you get coding, an entire chapter is devoted to object oriented programming in Ruby, so you'll be completely confident with the Ruby language before you begin working with Rails.
The example application that the book builds - a user-generated news web site - is built upon with each following chapter, and concepts such as sessions, cookies and basic AJAX usage are gradually introduced. Different aspects of Rails, such as ActiveRecord, migrations and automated testing are explored with each feature that is added to the application.
The book finishes with chapters on debugging, benchmarking and deployment to a live web server.
By the end of the book, you'll have built a fully-featured Web 2.0 application and deployed it to the Web. And all code is up-to-date for Rails 1.2, so you can begin coding immediately with the latest version of Rails.