Crafting Rails Applications: Expert Practices for Everyday Rails Development (Pragmatic Programmers)

Rails 3 is a huge step forward. You can now easily extend the framework, change its behavior, and replace whole components to bend it to your will, all without messy hacks. This pioneering book is the first resource that deep dives into the new Rails 3 APIs and shows you how use them to write better web applications and make your day-to-day work with Rails more productive.

Rails Core developer Jose Valim guides you through seven different tutorials, each of them using test-driven development to build a new Rails extension or application that solves common problems with these new APIs. You will understand how the Rails rendering stack works and customize it to read templates from the database while you learn how to mimic Active Record behavior, like validations, in any other object. You will find out how to write faster, leaner controllers, and you'll learn how to mix Sinatra applications into your Rails apps, so you can choose the most appropriate tool for the job. In addition, you will improve your productivity by customizing generators and responders.

This book will help you understand Rails 3's inner workings, including generators, template handlers, internationalization, routing, and responders. With the knowledge you'll gain, you'll be ready to tackle complicated projects more easily than ever before, creating solutions that are well-tested, modular, and easy to maintain.

Jose Valim is the lead developer and co-founder of Plataforma Tec. He started working with Ruby and Rails in late 2006 and was invited to be part of the Rails Core Team in 2010 after his work on Rails 3 development. He's also author and maintainer of various other well-known open source projects that led him to receive a Ruby Hero award in recognition for his contributions to the community. Lately, he's been flying around the globe giving talks and courses about Ruby and Rails.