Practical Rails Projects

P ractical Rails Projects is for developers who have already read a beginning Rails book (or worked though a series of introductory tutorials online) and are now looking to expand that knowledge by gaining practical experience developing a variety of web applications in Rails. It’s for developers who want to gain hands-on experience of building Rails applications that do interesting things such as caching, RESTful routing, using Active Resource and RJS, and c- necting Rails to legacy databases. While I do make the assumption that readers have read some previous Rails material, I believe that I’ve also provided enough review information that a highly motivated reader with previous experience in a model-view-controller framework and familiarity with another object-oriented language should be able to work through the material. The Problem with Most Training Books and Courses Over the course of my career, I’ve had to sit through an inordinate amount of technical training sessions, and I would estimate that 98 percent of them all suffered from the same major flaw— they didn’t actually teach anything. I sat in a classroom for a week and proved that I could f- low step-by-step directions. Heck, for the majority of them, I could even daydream about other things all day and still pass the course.