Buy My Book! (Please?)
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This week, my book Professional Ruby on Rails will be officially released. You can see sample chapters here, and you can buy the book at Amazon (affiliate link).
This book is designed to meet the needs of an intermediate to advanced Ruby on Rails user. The first wave of Rails books could not assume that the user had any pre-existing knowledge of Rails. As a result, they spent a lot of time covering the basics. The target reader for this book is somebody who has already read one of the basic books and now has to apply this knowledge to building a complete web site all the way from conception to deployment.
Written over the summer and fall, all the sample code in the book uses Rails 2.x, specifically including RESTful structures, respond_to, new migrations, cookie-based sessions, and other new features.
The book covers the kinds of tasks that nearly every site needs to handle -- user models, database performance, time zones and internationalization, creating common JavaScript navigation elements, REST web services, and graphics. Where there are commonly used plugins to support those features, the book covers those as well.
In addition to the application itself, there are other parts of the Rails life cycle. The book covers many of these issues including how to manage a Subversion repository, how to use Rake to simplify common tasks, Capistrano for deployment, RailsBench and profiling tools, generators, and plugins.
I wanted to include comprehensive and integrated coverage of automated testing. In addition to a chapter dedicated to advanced testing tools, nearly all of the sample code in the book is presented with its associated tests first. I believe this promotes the use of test-driven development and gives examples of how to test complex Rails code.
I had a lot of fun writing this book. If you are a Rails programmer, this book will improve your programs, and hopefully save you time and effort. If you're interested, please check out the samples, and buy the book. Thanks.
