Addison - The Rails Way

About This Book

This book is not a tutorial or basic introduction to Ruby or Rails. It is meant as a day-to-day reference for the full-time Rails developer. At times we delve deep into the Rails codebase to illustrate why Rails behaves the way that it does, and present snippets of actual Rails code. The more confident reader might be able to get started in Rails using just this book, extensive online resources, and his wits, but there are other publications that are more introductory in nature and might be a wee bit more appropriate for beginners.

I am a fulltime Rails application developer and so is every contributor to this book. We do not spend our days writing books or training other people, although that is certainly something that we enjoy doing on the side.

I started writing this book mostly for myself, because I hate having to use online documentation, especially API docs, which need to be consulted over and over again. Since the API documentation is liberally licensed (just like the rest of Rails), there are a few sections of the book that reproduce parts of the API documentation. In practically all cases, the API documentation has been expanded and/or corrected, supplemented with additional examples and commentary drawn from practical experience.