Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional

Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional is the first book of its kind to guide you through producing e-commerce applications with Rails, the stacked web framework taking the world by storm. The book dives right into the process of creating a production-level web application using agile methodologies and test-driven development combined with Rails best practices. You'll take advantage of the latest crop of Rails plug-ins and helpers that will radically improve your programming schedule. You'll also create a real application step-by-step, plus the book is driven by real-world cases throughout.

You will begin by learning how to install Rails and quickly create a product catalog interfaced with your choice of database technologies. Then you'll discover how to build modern, Ajax-powered shopping carts and add useful features like customer feedback modules. Next you'll learn how to integrate your application with open source packages like the Ferret full-text search engine, and how to interface with back-end electronic payment systems. You'll also learn how to make your application work flawlessly with existing production systems using web services, and then ultimately deploy and tune your application for production use.

Jarkko Laine is the owner and chief executive officer of O'Design, a Rails-based web design shop. He has been using Ruby on Rails since 2004 and has contributed patches to the core developer team, as well as contributing to several Rails plug-ins. He has provided Rails consultancy for a number of high-profile organizations, including a major mobile phone manufacturer, Starnet Systems, and Reforge Oy. He has also taught Rails at the university level and delivers lectures about Rails around the world. He lives in Tampere, Finland, with his girlfriend Maria and a growing list of pending household chores. For more information about the book, please visit www.railsecommerce.com.