Preface

I came to be an author on this book back in April 2010, and then spent about a year and a half writing it from scratch while working full-time. The first edition, Rails 3 in Action, was published in September of 2011. It’s now 2015 and the revised edition is finally here, this time focusing on Rails 4.2 instead of Rails 3.1.

During this time, many changes have come to pass in the Ruby and Rails community, with almost 40 new versions of Rails since 3.1. The way we whitelist data attributes received from the outside world has moved from the models to the controllers. The popularity of Cucumber (a staple in the first edition) has faded, and it has been replaced by RSpec and Capybara. Validation syntax has morphed. The find_by_* finders have been deprecated. And so much more.

By the time this book goes to print, Rails 5 will be due for release. Rails changes much faster than other frameworks, and with good reason—the community around it is actively evolving the best ways to write web applications. Other frameworks (or even languages, cough Java), evolve much more slowly. My thoughts about publishing this book, even though Rails 5 is coming soon, are these: It’s worthwhile to know Rails 4 and to have a good grasp of how applications are built. This book is a good indication of where the community is in terms of getting started with Rails at this particular point in time.