Rob Orsini opens his book Rails Cookbook by saying that Ruby on Rails has revolutionized the process of developing web applications and has enabled web developers to become much faster and more efficient, which allows for quicker application development. It is my opinion that the O'Reilly Cookbook series has done the same for software development. The fact is that it allows developers to become faster and more efficient, which allows for quicker development by providing time tested tricks and pearls of wisdom; exactly what you need when you need it.
Rails Cookbook is meant for someone with web development skills, but who may be new to Rails. It is also for those who are trying to learn new techniques in Rails and want a clear, concise method to learn it without having to read an entire book. In this cookbook there are over 170 recipes broken into 15 chapters. Together they provide a wide range of solutions that will help you test, debug, and improve your application.
In "Getting Started" you will learn how to install, update and set up version control with Subversion. "Rails Development" will show you how to begin development in Rails by creating a rails project and introducing other add-ons to make development more efficient.
"Active Record" shows you how to set up a relational database to use with Rails as well as working with the concept of Active Record which allows you to define the logic of your domain model using Ruby. "Action Controller" teaches you how to handle the incoming requests and how they hand off each request to a particular action. "Action View" completes the triumvirate of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern by showing how the data is presented to the user.
"RESTful Development" explores the Rails world of building full-featured web services within the Rails environment. "Rails Application Testing" shows how being proactive in the approach to testing comes by writing the tests before you write the code - by thinking about what the code should not do, then creating a test to make sure that it doesn't.
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