The word is out: with Ruby on Rails you can build powerful Web applications easily and quickly! And just like the Rails framework itself, Rails applications are Ruby programs. That means you can’t tap into the full power of Rails unless you master the Ruby language.
Ruby for Rails, written by Ruby expert David Black (with a forward by David Heinemeier Hansson), helps Rails developers achieve Ruby mastery. Each chapter deepens your Ruby knowledge and shows you how it connects to Rails. You’ll gain confidence working with objects and classes and learn how to leverage Ruby’s elegant, expressive syntax for Rails application power. And you’ll become a better Rails developer through a deep understanding of the design of Rails itself and how to take advantage of it.

Newcomers to Ruby will find a Rails-oriented Ruby introduction that’s easy to read and that includes dynamic programming techniques, an exploration of Ruby objects, classes, and data structures, and many neat examples of Ruby and Rails code in action. Ruby for Rails: the Ruby guide for Rails developers!

Ruby on Rails is the super-productive new way to develop full-featured web applications. With Ruby on Rails, powerful web applications that once took weeks or months to develop can now be produced in a matter of days. If it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t.
If you’re like a lot of web developers, you’ve probably considered kicking the tires on Rails - the framework of choice for the new generation of Web 2.0 developers. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running takes you out for a test drive and shows you just how fast Ruby on Rails can go.

This compact guide teaches you the basics of installing and using both the Ruby scripting language and the Rails framework for the quick development of web applications. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running covers just about everything you need - from making a simple database-backed application to adding elaborate Ajaxian features and all the juicy bits in between. While Rails is praised for its simplicity and speed of development, there are still a few steps to master on the way. More advanced material helps you map data to an imperfect table, traverse complex relationships, and build custom finders. A section on working with Ajax and REST shows you how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic user-centric web pages. The book also explains the essentials of logging to find performance problems and delves into other performance-optimizing techniques.

Ruby is an increasingly popular, fully object-oriented dynamic programming language, hailed by many practitioners as the finest and most useful language available today. When Ruby first burst onto the scene in the Western world, the Pragmatic Programmers were there with the definitive reference manual, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide. Now in its second edition, author Dave Thomas has expanded the famous Pickaxe book with over 200 pages of new content, covering all the new and improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. The Pickaxe contains four major sections:
An acclaimed tutorial on using Ruby.
The definitive reference to the language.
Complete documentation on all built-in classes, modules, and methods
Complete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries.
If you enjoyed the First Edition, you’ll appreciate the new and expanded content, including: enhanced coverage of installation, packaging, documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and enhancing Ruby’s capabilities using C-language extensions. Programming for the world-wide web is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML/RPC, SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating systems and other web services. There’s even a new chapter on unit testing. This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant changes since the First Edition). Coverage of other features has grown tremendously, including details on how to harness the sophisticated capabilities of irb, so you can dynamically examine and experiment with your running code. “Ruby is a wonderfully powerful and useful language, and whenever I’m working with it this book is at my side” –Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks

Do you want to push Ruby to its limits? The Ruby Cookbook is the most comprehensive problem-solving guide to today’s hottest programming language. It gives you hundreds of solutions to real-world problems, with clear explanations and thousands of lines of code you can use in your own projects.
From data structures and algorithms, to integration with cutting-edge technologies, the Ruby Cookbook has something for every programmer. Beginners and advanced Rubyists alike will learn how to program with:

Strings and numbers
Arrays and hashes
Classes, modules, and namespaces
Reflection and metaprogramming
XML and HTML processing
Ruby on Rails (including Ajax integration)
Databases
Graphics
Internet services like email, SSH, and BitTorrent
Web services
Multitasking
Graphical and terminal interfaces

Ruby is an agile object-oriented language, borrowing some of the best features from LISP, Smalltalk, Perl, CLU, and other languages. Its popularity has grown tremendously in the five years since the first edition of this book.

The Ruby Way takes a “how-to” approach to Ruby programming with the bulk of the material consisting of more than 400 examples arranged by topic. Each example answers the question “How do I do this in Ruby?” Working along with the author, you are presented with the task description and a discussion of the technical constraints. This is followed by a step-by-step presentation of one good solution. Along the way, the author provides detailed commentary and explanations to aid your understanding.

Ajax on Rails will teach you how to use both Ajax and Ruby on Rails to quickly build high-performance, scalable web applications without being overwhelmed with thousands of lines of JavaScript code. You’ll learn how to use Rails to simplify web development with scaffolding, helpers, breakpoints, and JavaScript templates like RJS. With advanced material that explains the most current design practices for Ajax usability, you’ll learn how to avoid user experience mistakes with proven design patterns and thorough user testing. With Ajax on Rails, you have the ideal guide for building the new generation of Web 2.0 applications quickly and cleanly.

As a development team, you want to be productive. You want to write flexible, maintainable web applications. You want to use Ruby and Rails. But can you justify the move away from established platforms such as J2EE? Bruce Tate’s From Java to Ruby has the answers, and it expresses them in a language that’ll help persuade managers and executives who’ve seen it all. See when and where the switch makes sense, and see how to make it.If you’re trying to adopt Ruby in your organization and need some help, this is the book for you.

Based on a decision tree, (a concept familiar to managers and executives) Java to Ruby stays above the low-level technical debate to examine the real benefits and risks to adoption.

Java to Ruby is packed with interviews of Ruby customers and developers, so you can see what types of projects are likely to succeed, and which ones are likely to fail. Ruby and Rails may be the answer, but first you need to be sure you’re asking the right question. By addressing risk and fitness of purpose, Java to Ruby makes sure you’re asking the right questions first.

Because technology adoption is only the beginning, Java to Ruby walks you through the whole lifecycle of prototype, ramp up, and production and deployment.

Typical enterprises use dozens, hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of applications, components, services, and databases. Many of them are custom built in-house or by third parties, some are bought, others are based on open source projects, and the origin of a few–usually the most critical ones–is completely unknown.

A lot of applications are very old, some are fairly new, and seemingly no two of them were written using the same tools. They run on heterogeneous operating systems and hardware, use databases and messaging systems from various vendors, and were written in different programming languages.

See how to glue these disparate applications together using popular technologies such as:

* LDAP, Oracle, and MySQL
* XML Documents and DTDs
* Sockets, HTTP, and REST
* XML/RPC, SOAP, and others
* …and more.

If you’re on the hook to integrate enterprise-class systems together, the tips and techniques in this book will help.

• The definitive reference manual for Ruby programmers.
• Up-to-date and expanded for Ruby version 1.8.
• Complete documentation of all built-in classes, modules, and methods.
• Complete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries.
• 200+ pages of new content in this edition.
• NEW: Learn more about Ruby’s web tools, unit testing, and programming philosophy.

The Ruby Way assumes that the reader is already familiar with the subject matter. Using many code samples it focuses on “how-to use Ruby” for specific applications, either as a stand-alone language, or in conjunction with other languages.

Topics covered include:

• Simple data tasks;
• Manipulating structured data;
• External data manipulation;
• User interfaces;
• Handling threads;
• System programming;
• Network and web programming;
• Tools and utilities.