Ruby on Rails is the super-productive new way to develop full-featured web applications. With Ruby on Rails, powerful web applications that once took weeks or months to develop... read more

Ruby on Rails is the super-productive new way to develop full-featured web applications. With Ruby on Rails, powerful web applications that once took weeks or months to develop can now be produced in a matter of days. If it sounds too good to be true, it isn't.

If you're like a lot of web developers, you've probably considered kicking the tires on Rails - the framework of choice for the new generation of Web 2.0 developers. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running from O'Reilly takes you out for a test drive and shows you just how fast Ruby on Rails can go.

This compact guide teaches you the basics of installing and using both the Ruby scripting language and the Rails framework for the quick development of web applications. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running covers just about everything you need - from making a simple database-backed application to adding elaborate Ajaxian features and all the juicy bits in between. While Rails is praised for its simplicity and speed of development, there are still a few steps to master on the way. More advanced material helps you map data to an imperfect table, traverse complex relationships, and build custom finders. A section on working with Ajax and REST shows you how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic user-centric web pages. The book also explains the essentials of logging to find performance problems and delves into other performance optimizing techniques.

As new web development frameworks go, Ruby on Rails is the talk of the town. And Ruby on Rails: Up and Running can make sure you're in on the discussion.

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The definitive, Jolt-award winning guide to learning and using Rails is now in its Second Edition. Rails is a new approach to web-based application development that enables developers... read more

The definitive, Jolt-award winning guide to learning and using Rails is now in its Second Edition. Rails is a new approach to web-based application development that enables developers to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications using less code and less effort. Now programmers can get the job done right and still leave work on time.

NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION: The book has been updated to take advantage of all the new Rails 1.2 features. The sample application uses migrations, Ajax, features a REST interface, and illustrates new Rails features. There are new chapters on migrations, active support, active record, and action controller (including the new resources-based routing). The Web 2.0 and Deployment chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect the latest thinking. Now you can learn which environments are best for your style application, and see how Capistrano makes managing your site simple. All the remaining chapters have been extensively updated. Finally, hundreds of comments from readers of the first edition have been incorporated, making this book simply the best available.

Rails is a full-stack, open source web framework that enables you to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications with a twist...you can create a full Rails application using less code than the setup XML you'd need just to configure some other frameworks.

With this book, you'll learn how to use Rails Active Record to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. You'll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, talk to web services, and interact dynamically with JavaScript applications running in the browser (the "Ajax" architecture).

You'll see how easy it is to deploy Rails. You'll be writing applications that work with your favorite database (MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and more) in no time at all. (hide)