ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6

refresher, you might want to go read Appendix A, on page 467 before

you go too much further. There’s a lot of code in this book....

David Says...

Every now and then you’ll come across a David Says... sidebar. Here’s where David Heinemeier Hansson gives you the real scoop on some particular aspect of Rails—rationales, tricks, recommendations, and more. As he’s the fellow who invented Rails, these are the sections to read if you want to become a Rails pro.

Joe Asks...

Joe, the mythical developer, sometimes pops up to ask questions about stuff we talk about in the text. We try to answer these as we go along.

This book isn’t a reference manual for Rails. We show most of the modules and most of their methods, either by example or narratively in the text, but we don’t have hundreds of pages of API listings. There’s a good reason for this—you get that documentation whenever you install Rails, and it’s guaranteed to be more up-to-date than the material in this book. If you install Rails using RubyGems (which we recommend), simply start the Gem documentation server (using the command gem_server) and you can access all the Rails APIs by pointing your browser at http://localhost:8808.

Rails Versions

This book documents Rails V1.0, which became available in mid 2005. However, as the first printing went to press in June 2005, this magic milestone had not yet been reached. In order to be timely, the APIs described in this book are those for Rails 1.0. The code in the book has been tested against the 0.13 release of Rails, the last release before Rails 1.0.

1.3 Acknowledgments

This book turned out to be a massive undertaking. It would never have happened without an enormous amount of help from the Ruby and the Rails communities. It’s hard to list everyone who contributed, so if you helped out but your name doesn’t appear here, please know that it’s a simple oversight.

This book had an incredible group of reviewers—between them, they generated over 6 megabytes of comments. So, heartfelt thanks to

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7

Alan Francis, Amy Hoy, Andreas Schwarz, Ben Galbraith, Bill Katz, Carl Dearmin, Chad Fowler, Curt Micol, David Rupp, David Vincelli, Dion Almaer, Duane Johnson, Erik Hatcher, Glenn Vanderburg, Gunther Schmidl, Henri ter Steeg, James Duncan Davidson, Johannes Brodwall, John Harechmak, John Johnson, Justin Forder, Justin Gehtland, Kim Shrier, Krishna Dole, Leon Breedt,

Marcel Molina Jr., Michael Koziarski, Mike Clark, Miles K. Forrest, Raymond Brigleb, Robert Rasmussen, Ryan Lowe, Sam Stephenson, Scott Barron, Stefan Arentz, Steven Baker, Stian Grytøyr,

Tait Stevens, Thomas Fuchs, Tom Moertel, and Will Schenk.

Rails was evolving as the book was coming together. As a result, the good folks in the Rails core team spent many hours answering Dave’s questions and generally sympathizing. (They also spent many hours tormenting me by changing stuff I’d just documented, but we won’t go into that here.) A big thank you to

Jamis Buck (minam), Jeremy Kemper (bitsweat),

Marcel Molina Jr, (noradio), Nicholas Seckar (Ulysses),

Sam Stephenson (sam), Scott Barron (htonl),

Thomas Fuchs (madrobby), and Tobias Lütke (xal).

Nathan Colgate Clark responded to a plea on the Rails mailing list and produced the wonderful image we use for the David Says... boxes.

Justin Forder did a great job of fixing up Dave’s anemic style sheets for the Depot application.

Thousands of people participated in the beta program for this book. Thank you all for taking the chance. Hundreds of these people took time to enter comments and errata on what they read. This book is better for it.

Last, but by no means least, we’d like to thank the folks who contributed the specialized chapters to the book: Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Thomas Fuchs, and Andreas Schwarz.

From Dave Thomas

My family hasn’t seen me for the last eight months. For their patience, support, and love, I’m forever grateful. Thank you Juliet, Zachary, and Henry.

From David Heinemeier Hansson

Marianne: For the patience of endless late nights hacking on Rails.

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