"When I read The Rails Way for the first time, I felt like I truly understood Rails for the first time.”

—From the Foreword by Steve Klabnik

Ruby on Rails 4 is leaner, tighter, and even more valuable to professional web developers. More than ever, it helps you focus on what matters most: delivering business value via clean and maintainable code.

The Rails™ 4 Way is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to delivering production-quality code with Rails 4. Kevin Faustino joins pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez to illuminate the entire Rails 4 API, including its most powerful and modern idioms, design approaches, and libraries. They present extensive new and updated content on security, performance, caching, Haml, RSpec, Ajax, the Asset Pipeline, and more.

Through detailed code examples, you’ll dive deep into the Rails 4 code base, discover why Rails is designed as it is, and learn how to make it do exactly what you want. Proven in dozens of production systems, this book’s techniques will maximize your productivity and help you build more successful solutions. You’ll want to keep this guide by your computer—you’ll refer to it constantly.

This guide will help you

• Build powerful, scalable REST-compliant APIs
• Program complex program flows using Action Controller
• Represent models, relationships, CRUD operations, searches, validation, callbacks, and more
• Smoothly evolve application database schema via Migrations
• Apply advanced Active Record techniques: single-table inheritance, polymorphic models, and more
• Create visual elements with Action View and partials
• Optimize performance and scalability with view caching
• Master the highly productive Haml HTML templating engine
• Make the most of Rails’ approach to session management
• Secure your systems with Rails 4’s improved authentication and authorization
• Resist SQL Injection, XSS, XSRF, and other attacks
• Extend Rails with popular gems and plugins, and learn to write your own
• Integrate email services with Action Mailer
• Use Ajax via Rails 4 support for unobtrusive JavaScript
• Improve responsiveness with background processing
• Leverage Asset Pipeline to simplify development, improve perceived performance, and reduce server burdens
• Accelerate implementation and promote maintainability with RSpec