The Rails 3 Way

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

Praise for the Previous EditionThis encyclopedic book is not only a definitive Rails reference, but an indispensable guide to Software-as-a-Service coding techniques for serious craftspersons. I keep a copy in the lab, a copy at home, and a copy on each of my three e-book readers, and it’s on the short list of essential resources for my undergraduate software engineering course.

—Armando Fox, adjunct associate professor, University of California, Berkeley

Everyone interested in Rails, at some point, has to follow The Rails Way.

—Fabio Cevasco, senior technical writer, Siemens AG, and blogger at H3RALD.com

I can positively say that it’s the single best Rails book ever published to date. By a long shot.

—Antonio Cangiano, software engineer and technical evangelist at IBM

This book is a great crash course in Ruby on Rails! It doesn’t just document the features of Rails, it filters everything through the lens of an experienced Rails developer—so you come our a pro on the other side.

—Dirk Elmendorf, co-founder of Rackspace, and Rails developer since 2005

The key to The Rails Way is in the title. It literally covers the “way” to do almost everything with Rails. Writing a truly exhaustive reference to the most popular Web application framework used by thousands of developers is no mean feat. A thankful community of developers that has struggled to rely on scant documentation will embrace The Rails Way with open arms. A tour de force!

—Peter Cooper, editor, Ruby Inside

In the past year, dozens of Rails books have been rushed to publication. A handful are good. Most regurgitate rudimentary information easily found on the Web. Only this book provides both the broad and deep technicalities of Rails. Nascent and expert developers, I recommend you follow The Rails Way.

—Martin Streicher, chief technology officer, McLatchy Interactive; former editor-in-chief of Linux Magazine

Hal Fulton’s The RubyWay has always been by my side as a reference while programming Ruby. Many times I had wished there was a book that had the same depth and attention to detail, only focused on the Rails framework. That book is now here and hasn’t left my desk for the past month.

—Nate Klaiber, Ruby programmer

As noted in my contribution to the Afterword: “What Is the Rails Way (To You)?,” I knew soon after becoming involved with Rails that I had found something great. Now, with Obie’s book, I have been able to step into Ruby on Rails development coming from .NET and be productive right away. The applications I have created I believe to be a much better quality due to the techniques I learned using Obie’s knowledge.

—Robert Bazinet, InfoQ.com, .NET and Ruby community editor, and founding member of the Hartford, CT, Ruby Brigade

Extremely well written; it’s a resource that every Rails programmer should have. Yes, it’s that good.

—Reuven Lerner, Linux Journal columnist

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