This is the first edition of the Rails book. The third edition is now available.

Out of Print

This book is currently out of print.

About this Book

  • 558 pages
  • Published:
  • Release: P6.0 (2006-07-31)
  • ISBN: 978-0-9766-9400-7

About the Author

As one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas understands agility. As the author of Programming Ruby, he understands Ruby and how to describe writing Ruby applications. David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of the Rails framework. Leon Breedt wrote the web services component of Rails. Mike Clark is an international expert on testing techniques. Thomas Fuchs contributed much of the AJAX support for Rails. Andreas Schwarz wrote the online manual on security for Rails. The authors know Ruby, and we know Rails.

Upcoming Author Events

  • 2012-11-08: Dave Thomas
    I'll be giving a keynote on the way that features of the Ruby language make it both powerful and fun to use. (RubyWorld conference, Matsue, Japan)
  • 2013-02-20: Dave Thomas
    Full day Advanced Ruby tutorial (RubyConf Australia)
  • 2013-02-21: Dave Thomas
    Keynote (RubyConf Australia)
  • 2013-03-20: Dave Thomas
    Three days, two presenters, one objective—to get you up and running with Rails (Pragmatic Studio, Reston, VA)
  • 2013-10-25: Dave Thomas
    Talk (and possibly a tutorial) (Rakuten Technology Conference, Tokyo)

Comments and Reviews

  • As a direct result of reading Agile Web Development with Rails, we built our initial product prototype using RoR and are now building our product using the technology instead of with .NET as we had originally envisioned. We have not formally announced the product, but in general it is an “enterprise” level application targeted at municipal governments. Thanks to both Ruby and Rails, we have made tremendous progress in development with the smallest dev team I have ever had!

    —Keith Lancaster