The Rails phenomenon is sweeping through our industry with reckless disregard for established programming languages, long-standing conventions, or commercial support. You can get a whole lot of information about Rails from articles on the Web, excellent books, and even formal course work. However, thereâs something missing: how does an established programmerâarmed with nothing more than a little Ruby knowledgeâgo just beyond the basics and be productive in Rails?
With Rails: Up and Running, Second Edition, we are not going to reiterate the reference manual or replace Google. Instead, weâll strive to give you the big picture of how Rails applications hold together and tell you where to go for the information that we donât cover in the chapters. Weâll take you just beneath the covers of Active Record, the Rails framework that gives Ruby objects a database backing. Youâll get just deep enough to understand the âmagicâ features that perplex most Rails newbies. By understanding the big picture, youâll be able to make better use of the best reference manuals to fill in the details.
We wonât try to make you digest a whole lot of words. Rather, weâll give you the theory in the context of an end-to-end application. Weâll walk you through the creation of a simple projectâone that is a little more demanding than a blog or shopping cart, but with a simple enough structure that a Rails beginner will be able to quickly understand whatâs going on. In short, weâre going to let the code do the talking, and weâll augment that code where youâll need some help to understand exactly whatâs going on.
Weâre not going to try to cover each new feature. Instead, weâll show you the ones we see as the backbone, forming the most important elements to understand. We will also cover the new migrations and REST features in some detail because various older books donât cover those features in too much detail.
In short, weâre not trying to build a comprehensive Rails libraryâweâre going to give you the foundation you need to get up and running.
Rails: Up and Running, Second Edition, is for experienced developers who are new to Rails and possibly to Ruby. To use this book, you donât have to be a strong Ruby programmer; we do expect you to be a programmer, though. You should know enough about your chosen platform to be able to write programs, install software, run scripts using the system console, edit files, use a database, and understand how basic web applications work.
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