Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce

We briefly mentioned ruby-prof in the performance optimization chapter of the book. At the time there were some compatibility issues between ActionProfiler and ruby-prof, however. Now Charlie Savage has come out with an all-new version of his profiler, ruby-prof 0.5.0. According to Peter Cooper, the new version “is a major leap forward”, which seems to indeed be true.

The discussion about the book seems to be very lively on the Rails mailing list. Unfortunately the amount of traffic on the list is huge so it’s really hard to spot the posts related to the book from there. Therefore, I created a new list just for discussion about our book.

The list can be found at groups.google.com/group/railsecommerce and works exactly as the Rails lists do. So go ahead and post your enquiries and questions there.

Dear Rails Enthusiast,

We just got email from our editor Keir where he said he’d got his hands on our new book, Beginning Rails E-Commerce. His mail didn’t include the words “f*cking awesome”, but instead “superb” and “a work of art”, which we think are almost as good.

This means that the book will hit the shelves before you can say “Heinemeier”, so be sure to get yours while it’s still hot.

We wanted to make our book such that you can “read” it while you’re sitting in front of your computer. It’s completely project-driven, meaning the content is divided by task, and that you can build the sample application in small iterations, learning the background details on the fly.

As one of the core philosophies of Rails is to support best practices, we decided to do that as well. Most of the tasks are written test-driven, giving you a glimpse of the ease with which TDD can be used in Rails and the power it brings compared to a traditional, ad-hoc web application development process.

We hope you enjoy the book as much as we enjoyed the journey of writing it.

• Directly from Apress
• or from Amazon.com

Best,

Christian Hellsten and Jarkko Laine