Agile Web Development with Rails 8

The eighth major release of Rails focuses on the ability to produce production-ready applications. It achieves this while building upon and retaining the ability to produce fantastic user experiences, and achieves all the benefits of single-page applications at a fraction of the complexity. Rails 8 introduces Kamal 2, Thruster, new database adapters, replaces the asset pipeline, and adds a new authentication generator. The result is a toolkit so powerful that it allows a single individual to create modern applications upon which they can build a competitive business—the way it used to be.

Ruby on Rails helps you produce high-quality, beautiful-looking web applications quickly—you concentrate on creating the application, and Rails takes care of the details. Rails 8 brings many improvements, and this edition is updated to cover the new features and changes in best practices.

We start with a step-by-step walkthrough of building a real application. We look in depth at the built-in Rails features. Follow along with an extended tutorial as you write a web-based store application. Eliminate tedious configuration and housekeeping, seamlessly incorporate JavaScript, send and receive emails, manage background jobs with ActiveJob, and build real-time features using WebSockets and ActionCable. Test your applications as you write them using the built-in unit, integration, and system-testing frameworks; internationalize your applications; and deploy your applications easily and securely.

Rails 1.0 was released in December 2005. This book was there from the start, and didn’t just evolve alongside Rails, it evolved with Rails. It has been developed in consultation with the Rails core team. In fact, Rails itself is tested against the code in this book.

What You Need:

All you need is a Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux machine to do development on. This book will take you through the steps to install Rails and its dependencies. If you aren’t familiar with the Ruby programming language, this book contains a chapter that covers the basics necessary to understand the material in the book.