Rails just keeps on changing. Rails 2, released in 2008, brings hundreds of improvements, including new support for RESTful applications, new generator options, and so on. And, as importantly, we’ve all learned a lot more about writing Rails applications in the last few years.

So here’s the Third Edition of the Jolt Award winning book that shows you a new approach to web development, updated for Rails 2. Sam Ruby joins the team to add his world-class knowledge of web application development, making this the most up-to-date and authoritative Rails book out there.

You can buy the combo pack of the third edition (which gets the PDF now and the paper book when it’s ready).

If you need a paper book now, we have a special offer. While stocks last, we’re selling the paper version of the second edition at half price.

Why has the ship date changed?

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
Code • Errata • Discussions
750 pages, Dec 2008
ISBN: 978-1-9343561-6-6

Buy Now

This title is currently available in Beta. Buy it now, and you'll be able to download successive releases of the PDF as the authors add material and correct mistakes. You'll get the final PDF when the book is finished.

If you buy the combo pack (Beta PDF + Paper Book) now, you'll get the Beta PDF now and the paper book when it's released on or about December 15, 2008.

 

About this Book

Rails swept to world-wide attention in the Spring of 2005. Since then, it has become a serious and popular alternative to traditional web development environments such as Java and .NET. Why? Because Rails has the best of both worlds.

You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management.

But Rails is more than a set of best practices. Rails also makes it both fun and easy to turn out very cool web applications. Need Ajax support, so your web applications are highly interactive? Rails has it built in. Want an application that sends and receives e-mail? produces and consumes web services? supports meaningful URLs? Want to write applications with a REST-based interface (so they can interact with other RESTful applications with almost no effort on your part)? All built-in.

With this book, you’ll learn how to use ActiveRecord to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. Need to create and modify your schema? Migrations make it painless (and they’re versioned, so you can roll changes backward and forward). 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, implement web services, and create dynamic, user-centric web-pages using built-in Javascript and Ajax support. There are extensive chapters on testing, deployment, and scaling.

As with the previous editions of the book, we start with an extended tutorial that builds parts of an online store. And, of course, the application has been rewritten to show the best of Rails 2.

Contents and Extracts

This book is currently in beta, so the contents and extracts will change as the book is developed.

  • Getting Started
    • The Architecture of Rails Applications
    • Installing Rails
    • Instant Gratification
  • Building an Application
    • The Depot Application
    • Task A: Product Maintenance
    • Task B: Catalog Display
    • Task C: Cart Creation
    • Task D: Add a Dash of AJAX
    • Task E: Check Out!
    • Task F: Administration
    • Task G: One Last Wafer-Thin Change
    • Task T: Testing
  • The Rails Framework
    • Rails in Depth
    • Active Support
    • Migrations
    • Active Record Part I:\\The Basics
    • Active Record Part II:\\Relationships between Tables
    • Active Record Part III:\\Object Life Cycle
    • Action Controller: Routing and URLs
    • Action Controller and Rails
    • Action View
    • The Web, V2.0
    • Action Mailer
    • Web Services on Rails
  • Secure and Deploy Your Application
    • Securing Your Rails Application
    • Deployment and Production
  • Appendices
    • Introduction to Ruby
    • Configuration Parameters
    • Source Code
    • Resources

About the Author

Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to many of the Apache Software Foundation’s open source software projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the popular Feed Validator web service. He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group of IBM. As one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas understands agility. As the author of Programming Ruby, he understands Ruby and how to describe writing Ruby applications. David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of the Rails framework.