Practical Rails Projects

Projects assumes you know the basics of using the framework, concentrating instead on taking you through the creation of a multitude of practical real-world examples, including a blog, a personal organizer, a calendar, a PHP site retrofitted to Rails, and much more. Each example application follows best practices, gives a nod to style as well as functionality, and takes advantage of many Rails plug-ins, Rails engines, and Ruby Gems. There is also discussion of cutting-edge Rails functionality, such as the new REST implementation and Active Resource.

The book starts off by taking you through setup of an ideal development environment as a helpful recap, before diving into the projects straight afterwards.
Takes you through the creation of several real-world Rails web applications.
Provides a guide to setting up a perfect development environment with Rails and SQLite or MySQL, supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems.
Doesn't waste time on the basics–assumes you know the fundamentals of Ruby and Rails already.
Covers the newest Rails functionality, such as new plug-ins and engines, as well as the Rails REST implementation and Active Resource.
What you'll learn
How to set up Rails for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
How to use Rails with both MySQL and SQLite databases
How to incorporate the latest plug-ins, engines, and Ruby Gems into your applications, saving you hours of development time
How to make consistent styling of your applications a walk in the park using the Yahoo YUI
How to retrofit a PHP site to Rails
How to add sparkle to your applications using Ajax techniques
How to use cutting-edge Rails functionality such as REST and Active Resource
Who is this book for?

This book is for anyone who has gone beyond the basics of Rails and wants to learn higher-level Rails techniques. It is also useful for those experienced in other disciplines (such as Java and PHP) who want to learn Rails.