The Art of Rails -- About the Author -- Credits -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Introduction -- What Is the Art of Rails? -- Whom This Book Is For -- What's Up With the Stories? -- Conventions -- Source Code -- Errata -- p2p.wrox.com -- Chapter 1: Emergence(y) of the New Web -- Rails, Art, and the New Web -- Patient History: The World Wide Web -- Emergence of the New Web -- Chapter 2: The Rails Concept -- One Part Framework -- One Part Language -- Two Parts Mindset -- Summary -- Chapter 3: The Server as an Application -- Model-View-Controller: The Abbreviated Version -- MVC and the Web -- The MVC Design Process -- Managing the Application Lifecycle -- Summary -- Chapter 4: Getting the Most from M, V, and C -- The Best API Documentation Is Free -- The Model -- The View -- The Controller -- Summary -- Chapter 5: Beautiful Web APIs -- Two Big Ideas for Web APIs -- Routing -- Anatomy of the Web API Call -- Overlaying the API -- Adding Custom MIME Types -- API-Metering, the Rails Way -- What about SOAP/XML-RPC Services? -- Summary -- Chapter 6: Resources and REST -- A Web of Resources -- Representational State Transfer -- REST and Rails -- Summary -- Chapter 7: The Five Styles of AJAX -- The Big Secrets -- The Five Styles of AJAX -- AJAX as Just Another API -- Rails-Style AJAX -- Elegant Degradation -- Summary -- Chapter 8: Playing with Blocks -- The Block Mindset -- Comparing Methods, Procs, and Blocks -- The Big Scope Experiment -- Block Patterns, Blocks in Rails -- Summary -- Chapter 9: Mixins and Monkey Patching -- Mixins -- Monkey Patching -- Summary -- Chapter 10: Code That Writes Code (That Writes Code) -- Dynamic Code and DSLs Revisited -- Code-Writing Macros -- Calling Methods That Don't Exist: Objects That Adapt to the Way You Use Them -- Reflection -- Summary -- Chapter 11: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Schema.

Bringing the Database into the Picture: The LAMP Stack -- Thinking in Migrations -- Team Schema Development -- Seeding Data for Production -- When a Database Isn't Enough -- Summary -- Chapter 12: Behavior-Driven Development and RSpec -- Behavior-Driven Development -- RSpec: BDD for Ruby and Rails -- An Example Trip through the Development Cycle -- But Wait, There's More -- Summary -- Index.