This book bridges the gap between what you'll learn from a typical beginner book about Ruby on Rails and what you'll need to know to create a solid, professional, spectacular, complex web application. Professional Ruby on Rails is a guide to taking a beginner web site and making it great. The book covers topics of interest to a web professional who is trying to develop and deploy a complex application. These topics include:

• Using REST to structure your application cleanly
• How to test and deploy your application for maximum automation with minimal headache
• Protecting your site and your user's data
• Using Rails to create the kinds of interactions that web users are coming to expect

The current Rails books are either beginner books, cookbook-style books, or specifically aimed at Ajax development. This book will fill the void for a book that discusses in-depth the information that a developer would need in order to move from a basic site to a fully featured web application.

First you'll learn how to build out your shared, virtual, or dedicated host. Then, you'll see how to build your applications for production and deploy them with one step, every time. Deploying Rails Applications will take you from a simple shared host through a highly scalable clustered and balanced setup with Nginx. See how to tell whether you've bought enough firepower, and learn how to optimize your Rails projects applications in a systemic, rational way. Take advantage of advanced caching techniques, and become and expert with the latest servers in Nginx and Mongrel. Don't worry. You'll get a dose of Apache too. Not only will you learn how to configure your production environment, you'll also see how to monitor it with free, automated tools that can restart your servers when the memory use gets too high for comfort. You'll see how to take a performance baseline, profile for bottlenecks, and solve the most common performance problems you're likely to see.

Ruby on Rails continues to build up a tremendous head of steam. Fueled by significant benefits and an impressive portfolio of real-world applications already in production, Rails is destined to continue making significant inroads in coming years. Each new Rails application showing up on the web adds yet more to the collective wisdom of the Rails development community. Yesterday's best practices yield to today's latest and greatest techniques, as the state of the art is continually refined in kitchens all across the Internet. Indeed, these are times of great progress.

FXRuby is a highly object-oriented toolkit for building lean, mean, cross-platform graphical user interfaces in Ruby. Since its initial release in 2001, FXRuby has become one of the most popular GUI choices for Ruby developers. This book is your best resource for rapidly learning how to develop powerful, sophisticated GUIs in your favorite programming language.

If you're a newcomer to GUI programming, this book will introduce you to the basics of FXRuby programming by leading you through building a GUI application with FXRuby from start to finish. If you're an experienced software developer who just needs to get up to speed on FXRuby and what it can do for you, this book will help you put FXRuby to work in your Ruby-based applications. Along the way, you'll learn how to leverage FXRuby's vast collection of user interface elements to build visually rich user interfaces. You'll see how FXRuby uses the concept of sending messages between objects to implement event-driven applications, and how you can most effectively use layout managers to construct flexible user interfaces.

Go beyond the basics with proven, practical knowledge and techniques for developing real-world GUI programs in Ruby.

As a PHP developer, you have some great tools for developing web applications. Ruby on Rails is another key tool to add to your web development toolbox. Rails is a high-level web development framework that emphasizes high productivity and clean code. However, the Ruby language and Rails framework take a different approach from the way many PHP developers write applications.

Ruby lies at the foundation of Rails, and we'll teach you the Ruby language from the beginning by building on your existing foundation of PHP. We'll explore Ruby through parallel code examples that illustrate the differences between the languages, and help you understand the Ruby idioms and how they differ from popular PHP code and style.

You'll then learn the Rails framework by iteratively building a complete application, starting from the home page through to a finished product. Along the way, you'll build your skills as a Rails developer by learning the Rails fundamentals such as MVC structure, domain modeling, and testing.

Ready to go to the next level with Rails? From examining the parts of Ruby that make this framework possible to deploying large Rails applications, Advanced Rails offers you an in-depth look at techniques for dealing with databases, security, performance, web services and much more. Chapters in this book help you understand not only the tricks and techniques used within the Rails framework itself, but also how to make use of ideas borrowed from other programming paradigms. Advanced Rails pays particular attention to building applications that scale — whether "scale" means handling more users, or working with a bigger and more complex database. You'll find plenty of examples and code samples that explain: Aspects of Ruby that are often confusing or misunderstood Metaprogramming How to develop Rails plug-ins Different database management systems Advanced database features, including triggers, rules, and stored procedures How to connect to multiple databases When to use the Active Support library for generic, reusable functions Security principles for web application design, and security issues endemic to the Web When and when not to optimize performance Why version control and issue tracking systems are essential to any large or long-lived Rails project Advanced Rails also gives you a look at REST for developing web services, ways to incorporate and extend Rails, how to use internationalization, and many other topics. If you're just starting out with rails, or merely experimenting with the framework, this book is not for you. But if you want to improve your skills with Rails through advanced techniques, this book is essential.

Business intelligence and real–time reporting mechanisms play a major role in any of today’s forward–looking business plans. With many of these solutions being moved to the Web, the popular Rails framework and its underlying Ruby language are playing a major role alongside web services in building the reporting solutions of tomorrow.

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is the first book to comprehensively introduce this popular framework, guiding readers through a wide–ranging array of features. Note this isn’t a staid guide to generating traditional reports, but rather it shows you how the Ruby language and Rails framework can create truly compelling reporting services by plugging into popular third-party applications and services such as Google AdWords, UPS.com, iTunes, and SalesForce.com.

Discover how JRuby on Rails can be used to create web applications faster and more efficiently while still taking advantage of the vast power of the Java platform.

Ruby on Rails is proving itself to be one of the most efficient and powerful agile web development application frameworks available and has had a profound influence on the Java community. The JRuby project offers Java developers the best of two worlds: the flexibility of Ruby on Rails coupled with the enterprise-level power and maturity of the Java platform.

JRuby core developer Ola Bini covers everything you need to know to take full advantage of what JRuby has to offer, including

• Full coverage on how to use JRuby to create web applications faster and more efficiently, while continuing to take advantage of the vast power of the Java platform
• Several real-world projects that illustrate the crucial specifics you need to know about the interaction of Java and Ruby
• Helpful, practical instruction and discussion on how web applications can be deployed using a variety of popular servers such as Apache and Mongrel

Business intelligence and real–time reporting mechanisms play a major role in any of today’s forward–looking business plans. With many of these solutions being moved to the Web, the popular Rails framework and its underlying Ruby language are playing a major role alongside web services in building the reporting solutions of tomorrow.

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is the first book to comprehensively introduce this popular framework, guiding readers through a wide–ranging array of features. Note this isn’t a staid guide to generating traditional reports, but rather it shows you how the Ruby language and Rails framework can create truly compelling reporting services by plugging into popular third-party applications and services such as Google AdWords, UPS.com, iTunes, and SalesForce.com.

The Ruby Programming Language is the authoritative guide to Ruby and provides comprehensive coverage of versions 1.8 and 1.9 of the language. It was written (and illustrated!) by an all-star team: David Flanagan, bestselling author of programming language "bibles" (including JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Java in a Nutshell) and committer to the Ruby Subversion repository. Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator, designer and lead developer of Ruby and author of Ruby in a Nutshell, which has been expanded and revised to become this book. why the lucky stiff, artist and Ruby programmer extraordinaire. This book begins with a quick-start tutorial to the language, and then explains the language in detail from the bottom up: from lexical and syntactic structure to datatypes to expressions and statements and on through methods, blocks, lambdas, closures, classes and modules. The book also includes a long and thorough introduction to the rich API of the Ruby platform, demonstrating — with heavily-commented example code — Ruby's facilities for text processing, numeric manipulation, collections, input/output, networking, and concurrency. An entire chapter is devoted to Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities. The Ruby Programming Language documents the Ruby language definitively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced programmers who are new to Ruby, and for current Ruby programmers who want to challenge their understanding and increase their mastery of the language.