This book is intended for intermediate to advanced Rails programmers. It assumes that you already<br>know Ruby, and have either read one of the many wonderful introductory books on Rails or have<br>otherwise consumed some form of a Rails tutorial. In either case, you don ’ t need me to tell you how to<br>create a basic Rails application.<br>The focus of this book is on the step that comes after just being able to make Rails work. You ’ ve read the<br>basic book, and now you ’ ve been asked to implement a real, live, web application. Suddenly you have<br>all sorts of questions that weren ’ t covered in the introductory material. How do I manage users and<br>security? Is there an easy way to manage time zones or other internationalization issues? How does Rails<br>expect me to organize a team of programmers and manage source issues? How do I automate common<br>build tasks, and how do I deploy to a production server? What do I need to do to secure my site? How<br>can I extend Rails to take advantage of the many wonderful things being done by the Rails programming<br>community?<br>If you ’ re interested in learning the answer to any of these questions, then this book is for you.
