Agile Web Development with Rails is a series of tutorial editions introducing the Ruby on Rails web application framework. It is edited by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson; it also features Leon Beedt, Mike Clark, Thomas Fuchs, and Andreas Schwarz. Due to its tremendous success, and the rapid rate of change within the Rails framework itself, a second edition was released only slightly more than a year after its initial release. A third edition, based on Ruby On Rails 2.1, was released in March, 2009. The 4th edition is in beta as of the end of July, 2010, covering Rails 3.0. Purchase... of physical and digital copies is available online from The Pragmatic Programmers. The book teaches new Rails users the framework by walking them through the development of an online store. For the more experienced user, the book is helpful in highlighting the "Agile" nature of Ruby on Rails. Web developers also learn how to use the ActiveRecord class to connect business objects and database tables. ActiveRecord allows you to abstract large amounts of the querying and creation code out of your models and can help with streamlining your controller code as well.
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