Introduction
There have been many extravagant claims made about Rails. For example, Curt Hibbs' Rolling with Ruby on Rails claimed that you could develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you could with a typical Java framework... The article then goes on to show how to install Rails and Ruby on a PC and build a working "scaffold" application with virtually no coding.
While this is impressive, "real" web developers know that this is smoke and mirrors. "Real" applications aren"t as simple as that. What"s actually going on beneath the surface? How hard is it to go on and build "real" applications?
This is where life gets a little tricky. Rails is well documented on-line; in fact, possibly too well documented for beginners, with over 30,000 words of on-line documentation in the format of a reference manual. What's missing is a roadmap (railmap?) pointing to the key pages that you need to know to get up and running in Rails development.
Four Days on Rails is designed to fill that gap. It's about 40 pages formatted for double-sided printing on A4, and by the time you've read it, you should have a useful toolbox of Rails techniques and a good idea of where to look on the web for more information. The current version of this document is 2.0.
Downloads
- Four Days on Rails .pdf format (700k)
- Cuatro Dias con Rails .pdf format (500k) (traducción por Emmanuel N. Millán)
- Four Days on Rails (Japanese) .pdf format (850k) (Masatoshi Itagaki)
- Four Days on Rails (Chinese) .pdf format (500k) (Iceskysl)
- Download the code used in Four Days on Rails .zip format (20k)
The document and the code have been tested on MS-Windows and Linux.
Notes
01-Aug-06: Please note - this tutorial is in need of revision to bring it up to date with new versions... I must find the time some day.
In particular, I have had reports that the data type tinyint(1) causes problems in the Priority field in the Item table - if this happens to you, please try increasing the size of the field.
