Practical Rails Projects (eBook)

This book provides intermediate Rails users with an essential learning aid to take them to higher level, teaching them countless real world techniques via a series of practical project-based chapters. Each chapter takes the reader through the complete process of building up a full-functional Rails web application. Projects taught in the book include a blog, a REST-based task manager, an online IT help desk, a web comic (including image upload facilities,) Wiki, and much more. Techniques learned include speeding up development with plugins, engines and Ruby Gems, styling with CSS libraries, and adding dynamism using Ajax.

Eldon Alameda is a web developer who currently resides in the harsh climates of Kansas. He works as a regional webmaster for the U.S. National Weather Service; prior to this, he did development for a variety of companies including local start-ups, advertising firms, Sprint PCS, and IBM. During the 1990s, he also acquired a nice stack of worthless stock options from working for dot-com companies.

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P ractical Rails Projects is for developers who have already read a beginning Rails book (or worked though a series of introductory tutorials online) and are now looking to expand that knowledge by gaining practical experience developing a variety of web applications in Rails. It's for developers who want to gain hands-on experience of building Rails applications that do interesting things such as caching, RESTful routing, using Active Resource and RJS, and c- necting Rails to legacy databases. While I do make the assumption that readers have read some previous Rails material, I believe that I've also provided enough review information that a highly motivated reader with previous experience in a model-view-controller framework and familiarity with another object-oriented language should be able to work through the material. The Problem with Most Training Books and Courses Over the course of my career, I've had to sit through an inordinate amount of technical training sessions, and I would estimate that 98 percent of them all suffered from the same major flaw- they didn't actually teach anything. I sat in a classroom for a week and proved that I could f- low step-by-step directions. Heck, for the majority of them, I could even daydream about other things all day and still pass the course.