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.

Nothing less than a revolution in the way web applications are constructed,Ruby on Rails (RoR) boasts a straightforward and intuitive nature that avoids programming repetition and makes it infinitely easier to build for the web. Over the years, RoR has undergone numerous internal changes while programming techniques have evolved. This book captures the current best practices to show you the most efficient way to build a spectacular web application with RoR.

Preparing you to build a real, live, and complex web application, this invaluable resource covers all the questions that aren't addressed in introductory material, including how to manage users and security, organize a team of programmers, automate common build tasks, secure your site, and deploy a production server. You'll learn everything you need to know in order to extend Rails so that you can take advantage of the many exciting and wonderful things that are being done by the diligent RoR programming community.

What you will learn from this book

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How to write automated tests for all parts of your Rails application
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Why rake is a handy tool for automating commonly performed actions
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Ways to manage time zones and internationalization
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How to deploy Ruby applications using Capistrano, Mongrel, and Apache
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Techniques for installing and running a Rails application in Java
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Current security techniques, including prevention of cross-site scripting attacks

Who this book is for
This book is for RoR programmers, software and web developers, designers, and architects who are looking to expand their knowledge of the Rails framework.