ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 19

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. (The sidebar on page 39 describes another way of installing the full API documentation.)

Rails Versions

This book documents Rails 1.2.

If you are not running Rails 1.2, then you’ll need to update before trying the code in this book. If Rails 1.2 is not yet available (this book went to print before the official Gem was released), you can download an interim version. See the instructions inside the front cover.

1.3Acknowledgments

You’d think that producing a second edition of a book would be easy. After all, you already have all the text. It’s just a tweak to some code here and a minor wording change there, and you’re done. You’d think....

It’s difficult to tell exactly, but my impression is that creating this second edition of Agile Web Development with Rails took about as much effort as the first edition. Rails was constantly evolving and, as it did, so did this book. Parts of the Depot application were rewritten three or four times, and all of the narrative was updated. The emphasis on REST and the addition of the deprecation mechanism all changed the structure of the book as what was once hot became just lukewarm.

So, this book would not exist without a massive amount of help from the Ruby and Rails communities. As with the original, this book was released as a beta book: early versions were posted as PDFs, and people made comments online. And comment they did: more than 1,200 suggestions and bug reports were posted. The vast majority ended up being incorporated, making this book immeasurably more useful than it would have been. Thank you all, both for supporting the beta book program and for contributing so much valuable feedback.

As with the first edition, the Rails core team was incredibly helpful, answering questions, checking out code fragments, and fixing bugs. A big thank you to

Scott Barron (htonl), Jamis Buck (minam), Thomas Fuchs (madrobby),

Jeremy Kemper (bitsweat), Michael Koziarski (nzkoz),

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 20

Marcel Molina Jr, (noradio), Rick Olson (technoweenie),

Nicholas Seckar (Ulysses), Sam Stephenson (sam), Tobias Lütke (xal), and Florian Weber (csshsh).

I’d like to thank the folks who contributed the specialized chapters to the book: Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, and Andreas Schwarz.

I keep promising myself that each book will be the last, if for no other reason than each takes me away from my family for months at a time. Once again: Juliet, Zachary, and Henry—thank you for everything.

Dave Thomas

November 2006

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“Agile Web Development with Rails...I found it in our local bookstore and it seemed great!”

—Dave’s Mum

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