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.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1. Zero to Sixty: Introducing Rails Rails Strengths Putting Rails into Action Organization The Web Server Creating a Controller Building a View Tying the Controller to the View Under the Hood What's Next? 2. Active Record Basics Active Record Basics Introducing Photo Share Schema Migrations Basic Active Record Classes Attributes Complex Classes Behavior Moving Forward 3. Active Record Relationships belongs_to has_many has_one What You Haven't Seen Looking Ahead 4. Scaffolding Using the Scaffold Method Replacing Scaffolding Generating Scaffolding Code Moving Forward 5. Extending Views The Big Picture Seeing Real Photos View Templates Setting the Default Root Stylesheets Hierarchical Categories Styling the Slideshows 6. Ajax How Rails Implements Ajax Playing a Slideshow Using Drag-and-Drop to Reorder Slides Drag and Drop Everything (Almost Everything) Filtering by Category 7. Testing Background Ruby's Test::Unit Testing in Rails Wrapping Up A. Installing Rails B. Quick Reference Index