Ruby and Rails

Get ready to see Rails as you’ve never seen it before. Learn how to extend the framework, change its behavior, and replace whole components to bend it to your will. Eight different test-driven tutorials will help you understand Rails’ inner workings and prepare you to tackle complicated projects with solutions that are well-tested, modular, and easy to maintain.

This second edition of the bestselling Crafting Rails 4 Applications has been updated to Rails 4 and discusses new topics such as streaming, mountable engines, and thread safety.

Rails just keeps on changing. Both Rails 3 and 4, as well as Ruby 1.9 and 2.0, bring hundreds of improvements, including new APIs and substantial performance enhancements. The fourth edition of this award-winning classic has been reorganized and refocused so it’s more useful than ever before for developers new to Ruby and Rails.

Rails 4 introduces a number of user-facing changes, and the ebook has been updated to match all the latest changes and new best practices in Rails. This includes full support for Ruby 2.0, controller concerns, Russian Doll caching, strong parameters, Turbolinks, new test and bin directory layouts, and much more.

(Looking for earlier versions? Rails 3.2 Edition is still available in ebook and paper).

Make beautiful apps with beautiful code: use the elegant and concise Ruby programming language with RubyMotion to write truly native iOS apps with less code while having more fun. You’ll learn the essentials of creating great apps, and by the end of this book, you’ll have built a fully functional API-driven app. Whether you’re a newcomer looking for an alternative to Objective-C or a hardened Rails veteran, RubyMotion allows you to create gorgeous apps with no compromise in performance or developer happiness.

What You Need:

A Macintosh running OS X 10.7 or later is required to install RubyMotion. RubyMotion is a commercial product and currently requires a purchased license. Experience with the Ruby language and Ruby tools like RubyGems and Rake are suggested.

Deploy using the JVM’s high performance while building your apps in the language you love. JRuby is a fast, scalable, and powerful JVM language with all the benefits of a traditional Ruby environment. See how to consolidate the many moving parts of an MRI-based Ruby deployment onto a single JVM process. You’ll learn how to port a Rails application to JRuby, get it into production, and keep it running.

Today’s modern Rails applications have lots of moving parts. Make sure your next production deployment goes smoothly with this hands-on book, which guides you through the entire production process. You’ll set up scripts to install and configure all the software your servers need, including your application code. Once you’re in production, you’ll learn how to set up systems to monitor your application’s health, gather metrics so you can stop problems before they start, and fix things when they go wrong.

Thousands of developers have used the first edition of Rails Recipes to solve the hard problems. Now, five years later, it’s time for the Rails 3 edition of this trusted collection of solutions, completely revised by Rails master Chad Fowler.

Working in the Rails View layer requires a breadth of knowledge and attention to detail unlike anywhere else in Rails. One wrong move can result in brittle, complex views that stop future development in its tracks. Break free from tangles of logic and markup in your views and implement your user interface cleanly and maintainably.

Learn from legendary Japanese Ruby hacker Masatoshi Seki in this first English-language book on his own Distributed Ruby library. You’ll find out about distributed computing, advanced Ruby concepts and techniques, and the philosophy of the Ruby way—-straight from the source.

Speak directly to your system. With its simple commands, flags, and parameters, a well-formed command-line application is the quickest way to automate a backup, a build, or a deployment and simplify your life.

• Check out What Makes an Awesome Command-Line App in the May issue of PragPub Magazine, as well as The Nine Facets of an Awesome Command-Line App on the author’s blog.

Your customers want rock-solid, bug-free software that does exactly what they expect it to do. Yet they can’t always articulate their ideas clearly enough for you to turn them into code. The Cucumber Book dives straight into the core of the problem: communication between people. Cucumber saves the day; it’s a testing, communication, and requirements tool – all rolled into one.

CoffeeScript is JavaScript done right. It provides all of JavaScript’s functionality wrapped in a cleaner, more succinct syntax. In the first book on this exciting new language, CoffeeScript guru Trevor Burnham shows you how to hold onto all the power and flexibility of JavaScript while writing clearer, cleaner, and safer code.

Writing code that works is hard. Writing code that handles unexpected errors and still works is really hard. Most of us learn by trial and error. This short book removes the uncertainty. With over 100 pages of content and dozens of working examples, you’ll learn everything from the mechanics of how exceptions work to how to design a robust failure management architecture for your app or library. Whether you are a Ruby novice or a seasoned veteran, Exceptional Ruby will help you write cleaner, more resilient Ruby code.

This book, available in PDF, mobi, and ePub formats, was entirely written and produced by the author. We are proud to be distributing it.

Rails 3 is a huge step forward. You can now easily extend the framework, change its behavior, and replace whole components to bend it to your will, all without messy hacks. This pioneering book is the first resource that deep dives into the new Rails 3 APIs and shows you how to use them to write better web applications and make your day-to-day work with Rails more productive.

Everything covered in this book is valid through at least Rails 3.1

For Rails 4, have a look at the second edition.

Rails Test Prescriptions is a comprehensive guide to testing Rails applications, covering Test-Driven Development from both a theoretical perspective (why to test) and from a practical perspective (how to test effectively). It covers the core Rails testing tools and procedures for Rails 2 and Rails 3, and introduces popular add-ons, including RSpec, Shoulda, Cucumber, Factory Girl, and Rcov.

Now you can bring the best of Ruby into the world of Java, with Using JRuby. Come to the source for the JRuby core team’s insights and insider tips. You’ll learn how to call Java objects seamlessly from Ruby, and deal with Java idioms such as interfaces and overloaded functions. Run Ruby code from Java, and make a Java program scriptable in Ruby. See how to compile Ruby into .class files that are callable from Java, Scala, Clojure, or any other JVM language.

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) gives you the best of Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, and Acceptance Test Driven Planning techniques, so you can create better software with self-documenting, executable tests that bring users and developers together with a common language.

Get the most out of BDD in Ruby with The RSpec Book, written by the lead developer of RSpec, David Chelimsky.

JavaScript is everywhere. It’s a key component of today’s Web—a powerful, dynamic language with a rich ecosystem of professional-grade development tools, infrastructures, frameworks, and toolkits. This book will get you up to speed quickly and painlessly with the 35 key JavaScript tasks you need to know.

NEW: Part of the new Pragmatic Guide series

As a Ruby programmer, you already know how much fun it is. Now see how to unleash its power, digging under the surface and exploring the language’s most advanced features: a collection of techniques and tricks known as metaprogramming. Once the domain of expert Rubyists, metaprogramming is now accessible to programmers of all levels—from beginner to expert. Metaprogramming Ruby explains metaprogramming concepts in a down-to-earth style and arms you with a practical toolbox that will help you write great Ruby code.

Ruby is the fastest growing and most exciting dynamic language out there. If you need to get working programs delivered fast, you should add Ruby to your toolbox.

This book has been superseded. Please see the Fourth Edition for Ruby 1.9 and 2.0, or the original PickAxe for 1.8.

For this new edition of the best-selling Learn to Program, Chris Pine has taken a good thing and made it even better. First, he used the feedback from hundreds of reader e-mails to update the content and make it even clearer. Second, he updated the examples in the book to use the latest stable version of Ruby, and also to use code that looks more like real-world Ruby code, so that people who have just learned to program will be more familiar with common Ruby techniques.

Not only does the Second Edition now include answers to all of the exercises, it includes them twice. First you’ll find the “how you could do it” answers, using the techniques you’ve learned up to that point in the book. Next you’ll see “how Chris Pine would do it”: answers using more advanced Ruby techniques, to whet your appetite as well as providing sort of a “Rosetta Stone” for more elegant solutions.

This Third Edition covers Rails 2.x

The Fourth Edition covering Rails 3.2 is available in eBook and print form. now available

The newest Fourth Edition covers Rails 4.x, and is now available in beta.

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU’RE BUYING THE RIGHT EDITION.

This screencast series is not being sold as they are out of date—the example applications are based on the 0.9.0.3 release of Sinatra.* Sinatra is a small Ruby web application framework that packs a big punch. It’s also a lot of fun! You can use Sinatra to write tiny, focused web applications and lightweight REST services very quickly. And sometimes a lean and mean web app is all you need. If you haven’t given Sinatra a look, now’s a great time to get a fresh perspective on web development. Learn how to get the most out of Sinatra from Adam Keys, an experienced Ruby and Sinatra developer.

Metaprogramming lets you program more expressively. This makes your code easier to write and easier to maintain and extend. Learn both the hows and whys of metaprogramming Ruby from Dave Thomas, one of the most experienced Ruby programmers in the western world.

If you need to automatically test a user interface, this book is for you. Whether it’s Windows, a Java platform (including Mac, Linux, and others) or a web app, you’ll see how to test it reliably and repeatably.

Many automated test frameworks promise the world and deliver nothing but headaches. Fortunately, you’ve got a secret weapon: Ruby. Ruby lets you build up a solution to fit your problem, rather than forcing your problem to fit into someone else’s idea of testing.

This book is for people who want to get their hands dirty on examples from the real world—and who know that testing can be a joy when the tools don’t get in the way. It starts with the mechanics of simulating button pushes and keystrokes, and builds up to writing clear code, organizing tests, and beyond.

eBook

This version, last updated Jan 2012, refreshes the RSpec examples for version 2.x. It also contains an updated section on narrative-style tests, based on Cucumber 1.x. Ian has tweaked code samples throughout the book for compatibility with Ruby 1.8.7, Ruby 1.9.2, or JRuby 1.6.5, based on what the underlying libraries support.

Are you a tester who spends more time manually creating complex test data than using it? A business analyst who seemingly went to college all those years so you can spend your days copying data from reports into spreadsheets? A programmer who can’t finish each day’s task without having to scan through version control system output, looking for the file you want?

If so, you’re wasting that computer on your desk. Offload the drudgery to where it belongs, and free yourself to do what you should be doing: thinking. All you need is a scripting language (free!), this book (cheap!), and the dedication to work through the examples and exercises.

The Pickaxe book, named for the tool on the cover, is the definitive reference to Ruby, a highly-regarded, fully object-oriented programming language. This Second Edition has more than 200 pages of new content, and substantial enhancements to the original, covering all the new and improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules.

What Version of Ruby are You Using?

If you want to use Ruby 1.9, or Ruby 2.0, then check out our new book Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0.

Alternatively, if you want to continue to use Ruby 1.8, then use the book on this page.

For various technical reasons, the eBook version of this edition is a PDF only: epub and mobi versions of this edition are NOT be available.