This book started life simply, as a series of blog posts right here on Rubysource.com. But with the help of SitePoint, we’ve package it into a handy 146 page ebook.

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What’s in this book?

This book will guide you in creating a Rails application. It will focus on setting your system up properly (for those systems that support it) and will fly a little lower than the typical 50,000 foot level of many tutorials.

By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to:

• set up Ruby Version Manager (RVM) to maintain sandboxed2 development en- vironments
• install Ruby 1.9.3 ␣ install Rails 3.1 ␣ create a Rails application
• determine what Rails IDEs exist, as well as their pros and cons
• generate a resource for your application to create, retrieve, update, and delete
• modify a view template
• know what’s next

While Rails is often touted as a good web development framework for beginners, there are rumblings in the community that Rails has outgrown that moniker the changes in Rails 3.1 are a result of a more mature community being in need of an advanced web framework. We’re going to focus on Rails 3.1 (RC4 at the time of writing), highlighting some of the changes at 3.1 as we go. I’ll assume that you’re comfortable on the command line; that is, “curl” is more than a Canadian verb.

Download the Table of Contents for the Book

More Info?

Here’s what author – Glenn Goodrich – has so to say … 

“… When I came up with the concept, I wanted a series about Rails that was beyond the “blog in 15 minutes” examples, dealing with the decisions, issues, and challenges that pop up when creating a “real” Rails application. Also, I wanted to level up, so to speak, in my own Rails development. At the time, I was much more on the beginner side of intermediate, which I felt was an advantage in writing the series. Once you’ve improved your knowledge of a technology, it’s difficult to remember what beginners need to help them improve as well. In this way, I believe Loccasions and the Rails Deep Dive series was successful. After a year of using Rails in my day job, I am not sure I could write a beginner/intermediate series.

As with anything I write (code or articles) looking back on this series, I can only see the places it needs improvement. I was tempted, for this book, to almost rewrite each post to make it more accurate or better or whatever. However, I think that would remove the original goal of what I was trying to do, which is write a deeper Rails tutorial series from the perspective of someone who was learning (a great deal) along the way. As such, you may find issues or may disagree with an approach taken by the series. That’s OK. Actually, that’s great. Especially if you publish your approach to the problem. It is in this way that the Ruby and Rails community grows and learns together…”