Agile Web Development with Rails, 3rd Edition

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 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? Built in. Supports internationalization and localization? Built in. Do you need 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 is extensive coverage of testing, and the rewritten Deployment chapter now covers Phusion Passenger.

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 V2.

Table of Contents

chapter 1 Introduction

part 1 Getting Started
chapter 2 The Architecture of Rails Applications
chapter 3 Installing Rails
chapter 4 Instant Gratification

part 2 Building an Application
chapter 5 The Depot Application
chapter 6 Task A: Product Maintenance
chapter 7 Task B: Catalog Display
chapter 8 Task C: Cart Creation
chapter 9 Task D: Add a Dash of Ajax
chapter 10 Task E: Check Out!
chapter 11 Task F: Administration
chapter 12 Task G: One Last Wafer-Thin Change
chapter 13 Task I: Internationalization
chapter 14 Task T: Testing

part 3 Working with the Rails Framework
chapter 15 Rails in Depth
chapter 16 Active Support
chapter 17 Migrations
chapter 18 Active Record: The Basics
chapter 19 Active Record: Relationships Between Tables
chapter 20 Active Record: Object Life Cycle
chapter 21 Action Controller: Routing and URLs
chapter 22 Action Controller and Rails
chapter 23 Action View
chapter 24 The Web, v2 0
chapter 25 Action Mailer
chapter 26 Active Resources

part 4 Securing and Deploying Your Application
chapter 27 Securing Your Rails Application
chapter 28 Deployment and Production

part 5 Appendixes
appendix A Introduction to Ruby
appendix B Configuration Parameters
appendix C Source Code
appendix D Resources