In just a matter of days, you can develop powerful web applications with Rails that once took weeks or months to produce with other web frameworks. If that sounds too good to be true, it isn't. Find out for yourself with Rails: Up and Running, the concise and popular book that not only explains how Rails works, but guides you through a complete test drive. Perfect for beginning web developers, this thoroughly revised edition teaches you the basics of installing and using Rails 2.1 and the Ruby scripting language. While Rails is praised for its simplicity, there are still a few tricky steps to master along the way. Rails: Up and Running offers lots of examples and covers just about everything you need to build functional Rails applications right away. Learn how to:

Preface; Who Should Read This Book?; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Platforms; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments;Chapter 1: Zero to Sixty: Introducing Rails; 1.1 Putting Rails into Action; 1.2 Organization; 1.3 The Web Server; 1.4 Creating a Controller; 1.5 Building a View; 1.6 Tying Controller Data to the View; 1.7 Under the Hood; 1.8 What's Next?;Chapter 2: Scaffolding, REST, and Routes; 2.1 Introducing Photo Share; 2.2 Preparing Your Project and Database; 2.3 Generating a Resource Scaffold; 2.4 RESTful Routes; 2.5 Wrapping Up the Scaffolding; 2.6 What's Next?;Chapter 3: Active Record Basics; 3.1 Active Record Basics; 3.2 Generating Models; 3.3 Basic Active Record Classes; 3.4 Attributes; 3.5 Complex Classes; 3.6 Behavior; 3.7 Moving Forward;Chapter 4: Active Record Relationships; 4.1 belongs_to; 4.2 has_many; 4.3 has_one; 4.4 has_and_belongs_to_many; 4.5 acts_as_list; 4.6 Trees; 4.7 What You Haven't Seen; 4.8 Looking Ahead;Chapter 5: Working with Views; 5.1 The Big Picture; 5.2 Seeing Real Photos; 5.3 View Templates; 5.4 Setting the Default Root; 5.5 Stylesheets; 5.6 Hierarchical Categories; 5.7 Styling the Slideshows;Chapter 6: Ajax; 6.1 How Rails Implements Ajax; 6.2 Playing a Slideshow; 6.3 Using Drag-and-Drop to Reorder Slides; 6.4 Drag-and-Drop Everything (Almost Everything); 6.5 Filtering by Category;Chapter 7: Testing; 7.1 Background; 7.2 Ruby's Test::Unit; 7.3 Testing in Rails; 7.4 Test Coverage; 7.5 Mocking with Mocha; 7.6 Assertions and Integration Tests; 7.7 Wrapping Up;Installing Rails; Windows; OS X; Linux;Quick Reference; General; Testing; RJS (Ruby JavaScript); Active Record; Controllers; Views; Ajax; Configuring Your Application;Colophon;