Beginning Ruby on Rails by Steve Holzner Ph.D.

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
If you've never built web applications before, Ruby on Rails makes it a whole lot easier to start. Whatever your experience, Ruby on Rails can help you build more substantial and powerful applications faster (and you'll have more fun doing it). Now Steven Holzner has written a beginner's guide to Rails that's as good as the framework itself.

With 100-plus books under his belt, Holzner may have more experience teaching programming technologies than anyone else on earth. So, whether he's discussing Ruby's core constructs (strings, variables, loops, arrays) or the Model-View-Controller architecture that's central to Rails, you can rely on him for accuracy, clarity, and relevance.

And efficiency. One concept at a time, Holzner manages to thoroughly introduce both Ruby and Rails in barely 350 pages (including the hands-on exercises and case study applications).

Holzner walks you through installing both Ruby and Rails, then learning enough Ruby coding techniques to get results. If you're a little weak on object-oriented programming, there's a chapter on classes, objects, and encapsulation. By Chapters 4 and 5, you're writing real web applications that access and store data -- and you're ready for Holzner's coverage of database-integrated web applications. Here again, Holzner assumes virtually no background, covering everything from creating your database to building a full-fledged shopping cart application.

By the end of the book, you'll know how to validate and test applications; centrally control them with Rails' Action Controller; and use Views. Holzner even offers up enough Ajax to whet your appetite.

As we've said, Holzner's written on just about every imaginable programming topic. Yet his enthusiasm for Rails is palpable. By the time you're done, we think you'll share it. Bill Camarda, from the January 2007 Read Only

From the Publisher

Ruby on Rails is the revolutionary online programming tool that makes creating functional e-commerce web sites faster and easier than ever. With the intuitive, straightforward nature of Ruby and the development platform provided by Rails, you can put together full-fledged web applications quickly, even if you're new to web programming.

You will find a thorough introduction to both Ruby and Rails in this book. You'll get the easy instructions for acquiring and installing both; understand the nature of conditionals, loops, methods, and blocks; and become familiar with Ruby's classes and objects. You'll learn to build Rails applications, connect to databases, perform necessary testing, and put the whole thing together to create real-world applications such as shopping carts and online catalogs—apps you can actually use right away.

What you will learn from this book
* How to install and use Ruby and Rails
* Object-oriented programming with Ruby
* Rails fundamentals and how to create basic online applications
* How to work with HTML controls, use models in Rails applications, and work with sessions
* Details on working with databases and creating, editing, and deleting database records
* Methods for handling cookies and filters and for caching pages
* How to connect Rails with Ajax

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to develop online applications using Ruby and Rails. A basic understanding of programming is helpful; some knowledge of HTML is necessary.

Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured,tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

Product Details

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