Apress - Pro Active Record For Ruby Databases With Ruby And Rails

Introduction

When we first shared the idea for this book with some of our peers in the Ruby community, they all had the same initial question, “Is there really enough to talk about in Active Record to fill a whole book?”

Our answer, then and now, is, “Yes and no.”

You see, at the time of this writing, Active Record has primarily been covered as a subsection, or maybe as a chapter or two, within a larger scoped book generally about the Ruby on Rails (RoR) framework. And almost all of those books actually do a great job of introducing you to the basics of Active Record; they go a long way toward getting you started with the library. However, because they are addressing a larger scope, all of the existing books also fall short in exposing the hidden features and benefits of using the Active Record library, and almost none even mention the fact that you can get many of the same advantages in your Ruby programs outside of the Rails framework.

If all we were going to do was get you enough knowledge to use the basics of Active Record as you build new Ruby on Rails projects, then no, there would not be enough to fill an entire book. Within this book however, we go much deeper into the library than any other source has to date. We explore the raw source code for the Active Record library. We help to explain the concepts, the rules, and the goals for the Active Record library—and we show you how to bend and break the library as you see fit for your own applications. We do this with lots and lots of examples, so you can try it all for yourself and learn by doing.

Our motivation for writing this book goes back to our beginnings using the Ruby on Rails framework. When first introduced to Ruby on Rails, we really liked what we were seeing. Clearly, Ruby on Rails was a powerful and intuitive framework that would make us more productive in our daily work. In our enthusiasm for the newfound tool, we began applying Ruby on Rails to many of our existing projects—and those words, “existing projects,” are key here. They are at the root of our motivation to write this book.