Press releases

Agile Web Development with Rails--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf: 3rd Edition of Jolt Award Winning Book Gives a New Approach to Web Development

Press release: April 8, 2009

Agile Web Development with Rails Raleigh, NC—Rails just keeps on changing. Rails 2, released in 2008, brings hundreds of improvements, including new support for RESTful applications, new generator options, and so on. And, as importantly, we’ve all learned a lot more about writing Rails applications in the last few years.

With Agile Web Development with Rails, the Third Edition of the Jolt Award winning book, you find a new approach to web development, updated for Rails 2. Sam Ruby joins the team to add his world-class knowledge of web application development, making this the most up-to-date and authoritative Rails book out there.

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. Need Ajax support, so your web applications are highly interactive? Rails has it built in. Want an application that sends and receives e-mail? Produces and consumes web services? Supports meaningful URLs? Want to write applications with a REST-based interface (so they can interact with other RESTful applications with almost no effort on your part)? All built-in.

With this book, you’ll learn how to use ActiveRecord to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. 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.

As with the previous editions of the book, we start with an extended tutorial that builds parts of an online store. And, of course, the application has been rewritten to show the best of Rails 2.

For a review copy or more information please email pragprogpr@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.

David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of the Rails framework.

Sam Ruby is a prominent software designer who has made significant contributions to many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source software projects and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the popular feedvalidator.org web service. He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group of IBM.

Dave Thomas is one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, and therefore understands agility. As an author of Programming Ruby, he understands Ruby. And, as an active Rails developer, he knows Rails.

Additional Resources
For more information about the book, including code, errata, discussions, and more, see the catalog page for Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition.

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson
ISBN: 9781934356166, 850 pages, $43.95 USD, £33.99 GBP
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000


About Pragmatic Bookshelf
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