Mini-review And Competition Of Rails Solutions

Source article

If you're a web designer or developer who thinks that the coding involved in developing dynamic web applications is too difficult, think again. This book, and the framework it covers, is the perfect solution to your needs. Ruby on Rails provides an easy-to-use method for quickly developing web applications, simplifying potentially complicated subjects such as web architecture, JavaScript, and SQL/database creation. The simplicity of Rails belies its power, though—this technology is used by major companies such as 37Signals and Google.

The book provides an introduction to Ruby on Rails with the web designer in mind. Instead of focusing on the intricate syntax of each method, the book focuses on the tasks you’ll want to perform on your website and then walks you through how to implement that functionality with Rails. Design and usability are kept in mind throughout, ensuring that your site both looks and works great.

Overview

The book begins by covering how to set up your computer as a Rails development environment (including the MySQL database) and then follows with an introduction to Ruby and the basics of the Rails framework. Next, you are taken through several practical examples that work together to build up a complete modern web application, covering essential and useful website features such as user login, adding and editing data, data validation, image uploading, and much more. The book even covers more-advanced Rails topics such as the Rails test suite, plug-ins and components, debugging techniques, and deploying your web applications using Capistrano.

In this book you'll learn:

How to develop web applications quickly and easily with the Ruby on Rails framework
The basics of programming principles and Ruby syntax, so you can begin to understand what’s going on under the hood
How to implement must-have web application features, such as user accounts, data validation, sending e-mail, image uploading, and more
How to use Ajax techniques with Rails and when not to use them
How to implement other Web 2.0 features in Rails, such as tag clouds and microformats

Summary of Contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Ruby on Rails
Chapter 2: Installing Rails
Chapter 3: Ruby for Rails Developers
Chapter 4: Getting Started with Rails
Chapter 5: More Advanced Rails
Chapter 6: Formatting Data
Chapter 7: Introduction to Ajax
Chapter 8: Bringing Forms to Life with Ajax
Chapter 9: Uploading Files and Sending Attachments
Chapter 10: User Authentication and Session Management
Chapter 11: Customizing Rails Views
Chapter 12: Using Rails Plug-ins and Engines
Chapter 13: Deploying with Capistrano
Appendix A: Caching Your Content
Appendix B: Testing Rails

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for beginning web developers and designers who are familiar with CSS and XHTML but who are (fairly) new to other programming languages.

Conclusion

As with most books from Friends of Ed, this book has a good layout. The book starts with an introduction to Ruby, helps you with the installation process and shows you how to work with Ruby using basic code examples. Then it moves on to more Advanced Rails, and displays how to format data. After that it shows how Rails can do AJAX. The book then makes a jump back again to creating applications that enable you to upload files, deploy authentication and session management. The last part is all about customization, plug-ins, deploying Rails and optimizing and testing the application.

The only downside is that some chapters are a bit short or even missing (there is no chapter on accessibility and the testing chapter is rather short) but the book points you in the right direction to get started.

This book offers an excellent starting point for the beginning Rails programmer.

Competition

We've got a brand new mini-review and competition of the Rails Solutions book. The friendly people of Friends Of Ed are giving away 5 books!

All you need to do, to enter the competition is, download the sample PDF and answer the following question:

"What is the purpose of the vendor directory?"

Send your answer to this e-mail address, before Thursday the 26th of April 2007. Don't forget to include your post address and phone number (required for international shipping) in the e-mail.