Rails 4 Application Development: Hotshot

• Build interesting application scenarios with Rails 4
• Upgrade your knowledge for the latest changes in the Rails framework
• Follow the project-based approach to building applications from simple to advanced skill levels

• Learn about new syntaxes and semantics introduced in Rails 4 and their practical usage
• Discover new ways to use the components and gems from previous versions of Rails
• Set up full text search, endless scroll, and modal boxes
• Create mountable engines and make code reusable
• Make multiple APIs (such as Google Maps and Twitter) work with each other
• Create API-only applications to serve as a backend for mobile applications
• Understand the basics of the new testing framework in Rails 4
• Create a video sharing website using Rails 4 along with HTML5 and CSS3 concepts

Rails is a rapidly moving, open source, web development framework, and keeping up to speed with it is a big task. You might have already built applications using it, but there have been significant changes in the syntax and semantic of the Rails framework in the latest upgrade. Upgrading applications needs an approach that not only helps the upgrade, but also helps to improve on what has already been built, so that it performs even better.

Presenting a practical approach to upgrading your knowledge for Rails 4, this guide shows you how to build the most popular types of applications using Rails 4, and highlights new ways to do things. The book also closely follows lots of the best practices, gems, and popular solutions already known to the community, and tracks the changes in these based on Version 4 of Rails. This book brings new ideas to refactor and restructure code to make it perform better in production, and enables you to write production-ready code.

The book starts off with relatively simple application, demonstrating the new application structure, the testing framework, and several day-to-day tasks. The complexity of applications will increase with each chapter.

In the first half of the book, you will learn to build a recipe sharing website, a conference and RSVP management application, an online Pinboard similar to Pinterest, a SaaS-based application, and a customizable content management system demonstrating concepts. In the later half, you will get to know MongoDB by building an analytics dashboard using MongoDB and Rails. You will also create a mash-up of some common APIs such as Google Maps and Twitter and make them work with one another. One of the new features we will look at in this book is an API-only application with no frontend. At the end of the book, you will learn how to use HTML5 concepts to your advantage and extend the Rails framework with reusable engines.

This book is designed to update, upgrade, and improve your knowledge of Rails 4, as well as your applications.

Attractive practical projects to polish your application building skills, through a straightforward, highly focused and interesting approach towards application development.

Who this book is for