Ruby on Rails™ Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails, Second Edition

Chapter 11. Following Users

In this chapter, we will complete the core sample application by adding a social layer that allows users to follow (and unfollow) other users, resulting in each user’s Home page displaying a status feed of the followed users’ microposts. We will also make views to display both a user’s followers and the users each user is following. We will learn how to model relationships between users in Section 11.1, then make the web interface in Section 11.2 (including an introduction to Ajax). Finally, we’ll end by developing a fully functional status feed in Section 11.3.

This final chapter contains some of the most challenging material in the tutorial, including some Ruby/SQL trickery to make the status feed. Through these ...