Agile Web Development with Rails Second Edition

The first edition of “Agile Web Development with Rails” won the Jolt
Award for best technical book of 2005. Now, in the newly revised and updated
Second Edition (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 0-9776166-3-0) by Dave Thomas and David
Heinemeier Hansson et al, readers can get the most definitive, up-to-date
tutorial and reference to the Rails framework available.

“It’s amazing how much Rails has changed over the last year. It’s wonderful to
be able to publish a second edition that includes all the latest Rails
features,” says author Dave Thomas.

Rails swept to world-wide attention in the Spring of 2005. Since then, it has
become a serious and popular alternative to traditional web development
environments such as Java and .NET. Why? Because Rails has the best of both
worlds.

You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack,
open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and
integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code
across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management.
But Rails is more than a set of best practices. Rails also makes it both fun and
easy to turn out very cool web applications, with plenty of convenient, built-in
features that working professionals demand.

With this book, you’ll learn how to use ActiveRecord to connect business objects
and database tables easily. Need to create and modify your schema?
Migrations make it painless (and they’re versioned, so you can roll changes
backward and forward). You’ll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to
route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and
components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails,
implement web services, and create dynamic, user-centric web-pages using
built-in Javascript and Ajax support. There are extensive chapters on testing,
deployment, and scaling.

This is a substantial overhaul and rewrite from the first edition, and includes
new material and as well another year’s worth of Rails best practices from the
real world.

Agile Web Development with Rails, Second Edition by Dave Thomas, and David
Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, and Andreas Schwarz