Practical Rails Plugins

The Rails framework empowers developers with unprecedented levels of productivity by embracing principles such as “convention over configuration” and “don’t repeat yourself”. This paradigm is even apparent at the community level, where developers regularly share their custom framework extensions by way of Rails’ plugins feature. Plugins offer a way for developers to extend the core Rails framework with their own custom features, allowing for rapid integration of features such as authentication, user ratings, and search.

Practical Rails Plugins shows you how to capitalize upon the wide variety of plugins at your disposal by guiding you through their integration into a number of interesting projects. You’ll learn how to rapidly augment projects involving asynchronous video transcoding, geocoding and mapping, content management, community ratings, and PDF generation. You’ll also learn how to create and distribute your own plugins.

• The ultimate guide to building powerful web sites faster using Rails plugins
• Demonstrates how to use popular plugins within a number of practical (and fully functional) projects and mini–applications
• Shows you how to create and distribute your own plugins

Nick Plante is a programmer, author, entrepreneur and (most of all) a nice guy. As a partner in Ubikorp Internet Services, Nick specializes in helping web startups accelerate their development with Ruby and Rails. He's also a co-organizer of the New Hampshire Ruby User Group and the Rails Rumble coding competition, and contributes to numerous open source projects. Prior to his involvement in the Ruby community, Nick spent time in the trenches with Java, PHP, Flash/ActionScript, and C/C++. In his free time, he enjoys independent film, comic books, loud music, and talking about himself in the third person. If you feel like discussing any of these topics, he'd be happy to hear from you. Nick's contact information can be found on his blog at http://blog.zerosum.org.