Sam Ma's Weblog

# Author: Bruce Tate & Curt Hibbs
# Paperback: 182 pages
# Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (August 22, 2006)
# Language: English

Chapter 1. Zero to Sixty: Introducing Rails
Section 1.1. Rails Strengths
Section 1.2. Putting Rails into Action
Section 1.3. Organization
Section 1.4. The Web Server
Section 1.5. Creating a Controller
Section 1.6. Building a View
Section 1.7. Tying the Controller to the View
Section 1.8. Under the Hood
Section 1.9. What's Next?
Chapter 2. Active Record Basics
Section 2.1. Active Record Basics
Section 2.2. Introducing Photo Share
Section 2.3. Schema Migrations
Section 2.4. Basic Active Record Classes
Section 2.5. Attributes
Section 2.6. Complex Classes
Section 2.7. Behavior
Section 2.8. Moving Forward
Chapter 3. Active Record Relationships
Section 3.1. belongs_to
Section 3.2. has_many
Section 3.3. has_one
Section 3.4. What You Haven't Seen
Section 3.5. Looking Ahead
Chapter 4. Scaffolding
Section 4.1. Using the Scaffold Method
Section 4.2. Replacing Scaffolding
Section 4.3. Generating Scaffolding Code
Section 4.4. Moving Forward
Chapter 5. Extending Views
Section 5.1. The Big Picture
Section 5.2. Seeing Real Photos
Section 5.3. View Templates
Section 5.4. Setting the Default Root
Section 5.5. Stylesheets
Section 5.6. Hierarchical Categories
Section 5.7. Styling the Slideshows
Chapter 6. Ajax
Section 6.1. How Rails Implements Ajax
Section 6.2. Playing a Slideshow
Section 6.3. Using Drag-and-Drop to Reorder Slides
Section 6.4. Drag and Drop Everything (Almost Everything)
Section 6.5. Filtering by Category
Chapter 7. Testing
Section 7.1. Background
Section 7.2. Ruby's Test::Unit
Section 7.3. Testing in Rails
Section 7.4. Wrapping Up
Appendix A. Installing Rails
Section 1.1. Windows
Section 2.1. OS X
Section 3.1. Linux
Appendix B. Quick Reference
Section 5.1. General
Section 5.2. Testing
Section 5.3. RJS (Ruby JavaScript)
Section 5.4. Active Record
Section 5.5. Controllers
Section 5.6. Views
Section 5.7. Ajax
Section 5.8. Configuring Your Application

This book is easy to read and understand, especially for that people who familiar with CakePHP, Symfony or Django, if you don't have any experience on them, my suggestion is to have a test learning one of them, and the next, is the Ruby on Rails framework.

You can read this book without any Ruby knowledge, this is the greatest point of this book, if you wish, you can learn Ruby after you read this book. I think Ruby is a easy using but hard learning programming language, just like Perl.

This book is quite simple to the whole ROR framework, but it's enough for me to have a first look at this framework, true words, many idea of CakePHP and Symfony are comes from ROR: like Active Recode, Code Generator, Helper System and so on.

Thanks,
Sam Ma