The Rails 4 Way

The beta period for this book is over. Get your own paper and electronic versions at InformIT or Amazon and other traditional booksellers.

In less than ten years, with fanatical support of a veritable army of open source contributors, Ruby on Rails has forcefully taken its place as the dominant king of web frameworks. It has conquered developer mindshare at startups and enterprises alike with its focus of simplicity, convention and clean, maintainable code. The latest version, Rails 4, continues the tradition of enhanced performance, security and developer productivity, with improvements that enable professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value quickly and consistently.

The Rails™ 4 Way is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to delivering production-quality code with Rails 4.1. Pioneering Rails expert Obie Fernandez and his team of leading Rails experts illuminate the entire set of Rails APIs, along with the idioms, design approaches, and libraries that make developing applications with Rails so powerful. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience and track record, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails to maximize your productivity.

Using numerous detailed code examples, the author systematically cover Rails key capabilities and subsystems, making this book a reference that you depend on everyday. He presents advanced Rails programming techniques that have been proven effective in day-to-day usage on dozens of production Rails systems and offers important insights into behavior-driven development and production considerations such as scalability. Dive deep into the subtleties of the asset pipeline and other advanced Rails topics such as security and scalability. The Rails 4 Way is your best guide for making Rails do exactly what you want it to do.

Notable Changes in the new edition

• Discussion of "omakase" versus "prime" Rails stacks (as advocated by DHH vs TRW, et al)
• Ruby 2.0 support in Rails
• Native support for new Postgres Data types and enhancements in ActiveRecord
• ActiveModel::Model "a really small, handy addition to Rails 4.0, which helps us to get classes that act more like ActiveRecord and easily integrate with ActionPack."
• Asset Pipeline and Sprockets
• Russian Doll-caching through key-based expiration with automatic dependency management of nested templates
• Livestreaming for persistent connections
• Comprehensive coverage of security topics (new chapter, including addition Strong Parameters)
• Changes in HTTP handling in Rails: PATCH vs. PUT
• Turbolinks (and significant updates to the Ajax chapter)
• New comprehensive "Essential Gems" appendix highlighting the best add-on libraries that the Rails ecosystem has to offer