Practical Rails Projects Master Ruby on rails by working through a series of practical,real-world web development projects

The best way to learn Rails is by creating a variety of applications with it.

You already know the basics of Rails, and you're familiar with the exciting features and benefits associated with using this Ruby–based framework. You're now at the point where you need to gain firsthand experience with Rails by thoroughly exploring the features and building several different types of web applications.

Eldon Alameda takes a focused approach to guiding you through the creation of multiple real-world examples that are designed to get your hands dirty with the core features of Rails, while providing you with the valuable experience of creating real Rails applications.

Projects you'll work on include creating a simple blog with an external API, constructing a workout tracker with a RESTful interface and graphs, and converting an existing PHP site to Rails while adding an advanced JavaScript interface. As an added bonus, the final project makes use of the edge version of Rails as you build an application that utilizes Active Resource, which provides an opportunity to explore the various changes and features that will be included with Rails 2.0. Each project is designed to provide you with the necessary information and tools to give you a running start at solving that problem yourself, and each project includes a number of additional ideas and exercises for ways that you can extend each application to fit your own needs.

Making the Right Preparations (Don’t Skip This Part).- Building a Development Environment.- Creating a Rails Application.- Monkey Tasks: Managing a Daily Task List.- Implementing a User Registration and Authentication System.- Building a Daily To-Do Manager.- Enhancing Monkey Tasks.- Exercisr.- Developing a REST-Based Application.- Adding Graphs to Our Application.- Enhancing Exercisr.- Simple Blogs.- Building a Blog Using Typo.- Building a Simple Blog Engine.- Enhancing Our Blogs.- Building a Web Comic Using Caching.- Building Our Base System with Page Caching.- Implementing Advanced Caching.- Enhancing the Web Comic.- Church Community Site.- Managing Users and Profiles.- Rounding out the Community.- Enhancing the Church Community Application.- GamingTrend.- Understanding the Problems of the Legacy PHP Site.- Converting Game Records.- Supporting News.- Enhancing the Gaming Site.- Integrating with a RESTful Application Using Edge Rails (Rails 2.0 ).- Brief Overview of Highrise.- Integrating to the Highrise REST API.- Building the Appointment Scheduler.- Enhancing Our Rails 2.0 Application.

Eldon Alameda is a web developer who currently resides in the harsh climates of Kansas. He works as a regional webmaster for the U.S. National Weather Service; prior to this, he did development for a variety of companies including local start-ups, advertising firms, Sprint PCS, and IBM. During the 1990s, he also acquired a nice stack of worthless stock options from working for dot-com companies.