In just a matter of days, you can develop powerful web applications with Rails that once took weeks or months to produce with other web frameworks. If that sounds too good to be true, it isn't. Find out for yourself with Rails: Up and Running, the concise and popular book that not only explains how Rails works, but guides you through a complete test drive.

Perfect for beginning web developers, this thoroughly revised edition teaches you the basics of installing and using Rails 2.1 and the Ruby scripting language. While Rails is praised for its simplicity, there are still a few tricky steps to master along the way. Rails: Up and Running offers lots of examples and covers just about everything you need to build functional Rails applications right away. Learn how to:

• Create simple database-backed applications, and build dynamic user-centric web pages using Ajax and REST
• Exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails and implement web services
• Map data to an imperfect table, traverse complex relationships, and build custom finders
• Use techniques to solve common database performance problems