The Rails 3 Way, 2nd Edition

The Rails™ 3 Way is a comprehensive resource that digs into the new features in Rails 3 and perhaps more importantly, the rationale behind them.
—Yehuda Katz, Rails Core

The Bible for Ruby on Rails Application Development

Ruby on Rails strips complexity from the development process, enabling professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value via clean and maintainable code. The Rails™ 3 Way is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to delivering production-quality code with Rails 3. Pioneering Rails expert Obie Fernandez and a team of leading experts illuminate the entire Rails 3 API, along with the idioms, design approaches, and libraries that make developing applications with Rails so powerful. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience and track record, they address  the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails 3 to maximize your productivity.

Using numerous detailed code examples, the author systematically covers Rails 3 key capabilities and subsystems, making this book a reference that you will turn to again and again. He presents advanced Rails programming techniques that have been proven effective in day-to-day usage on dozens of production Rails systems and offers important insights into behavior-driven development and production considerations such as scalability. Dive deep into the Rails 3 codebase and discover why Rails is designed the way it is—and how to make it do what you want it to do.

This book will help you

• Learn what’s new in Rails 3
• Increase your productivity as a web application developer
• Realize the overall joy in programming with Rails
• Leverage Rails’ powerful capabilities for building REST-compliant APIs
• Drive implementation and protect long-term maintainability using RSpec
• Design and manipulate your domain layer using Active Record
• Understand and program complex program flows using Action Controller
• Master sophisticated URL routing concepts
• Use Ajax techniques via Rails 3 support for unobtrusive JavaScript
• Learn to extend Rails with popular gems and plugins, and how to write your own
• Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own
• Integrate email services into your applications with Action Mailer
• Improve application responsiveness with background processing
• Create your own non-Active Record domain classes using Active Model
• Master Rails’ utility classes and extensions in Active Support

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Rails Environments and Configuration
Chapter 2 Routing
Chapter 3 REST, Resources, and Rails
Chapter 4 Working with Controllers
Chapter 5 Working with Active Record
Chapter 6 Active Record Migrations
Chapter 7 Active Record Associations
Chapter 8 Validations
Chapter 9 Advanced Active Record
Chapter 10 Action View
Chapter 11 All About Helpers
Chapter 12 Ajax on Rails
Chapter 13 Session Management
Chapter 14 Authentication
Chapter 15 XML and Active Resource
Chapter 16 Action Mailer
Chapter 17 Caching and Performance
Chapter 18 RSpec
Chapter 19 Extending Rails with Plugins
Chapter 20 Background Processing

Appendix A: Active Model API Reference
Appendix B: Active Support API Reference