Pragmatic - Rails Recipes

Introduction

If I were to buy a real recipe book—you know: a book about cooking food—I wouldn’t be looking for a book that tells me how to dice vegetables or how to use a skillet. I can find that kind of information in an overview about cooking.

A recipe book is about how to make things you might not be able to easily figure out how to make on your own. It’s about skipping the trial and error and jumping straight to a solution that works. Sometimes it’s even about making things you never imagined you could make.

If you want to learn how to make great Indian food, you buy a recipe book by a great Indian chef and follow his or her directions. You’re not just buying any old solution. You’re buying a solution you can trust to be good. That’s why famous chefs sell lots and lots of books. People want to make food that tastes good, and these chefs know how to make (and teach you how to make) food that tastes good.

Good recipe books do teach you techniques. Sometimes they even teach you about new tools. But they teach these things within the context and the end goal of making something—not just to teach them.

My goal for Rails Recipes is to teach you how to make great stuff with Rails and to do it right on your first try. These recipes and the techniques therein are extractions from my own work and from the “great chefs” of Rails: the core Rails developer team, the leading trainers and authors, and the earliest of early adopters.