Practical Rails Plugins

The Rails framework empowers developers with unprecedented levels of productivity by embracing principles such as “convention over configuration” and “don’t repeat yourself”. This paradigm is even apparent at the community level, where developers regularly share their custom framework extensions by way of Rails’ plugins feature. Plugins offer a way for developers to extend the core Rails framework with their own custom features, allowing for rapid integration of features such as authentication, user ratings, and search.

Practical Rails Plugins shows you how to capitalize upon the wide variety of plugins at your disposal by guiding you through their integration into a number of interesting projects. You’ll learn how to rapidly augment projects involving asynchronous video transcoding, geocoding and mapping, content management, community ratings, and PDF generation. You’ll also learn how to create and distribute your own plugins.

• The ultimate guide to building powerful web sites faster using Rails plugins
• Demonstrates how to use popular plugins within a number of practical (and fully functional) projects and mini–applications
• Shows you how to create and distribute your own plugins

• Install and manage your plugin collection
• Effectively manage the development process using plugins for browser testing, model augmentation, and data validation
• Use plugins to expand your application’s abilities, adding features such as OpenID authentication, file attachment handling, graphing and charting, and full text search
• Create and distribute your own plugins for use by other community members!

Rails developers interested in taking advantage of plugins to streamline application development.

The meteoric ascent in popularity of the Rails framework is in large part due to the enormous productivity gains it has to offer. One reason for this productivity is a feature known as plugins, which enable developers to extend the Rails framework in a variety of interesting ways. What's more, these plugins can be shared with other Rails developers, and accordingly a vibrant plugin community has blossomed.

Practical Rails Plugins is the first book to comprehensively discuss Rails plugins, discussing many of the most popular plugins in the context of four real-world projects.

Nick Plante is a programmer, author, entrepreneur and (most of all) a nice guy. As a partner in Ubikorp Internet Services, Nick specializes in helping web startups accelerate their development with Ruby and Rails. He’s also a co–organizer of the NH Ruby User Group and the Rails Rumble coding competition, and contributes to numerous open source projects.

Prior to his involvement in the Ruby community, Nick spent time in the trenches with Java, PHP, Flash/ActionScript, and C/C++. In his free time he enjoys independent film, comic books, loud music, and talking about himself in the third person. If you feel like discussing any of these topics, he’d be happy to hear from you. Nick’s contact information can be found on his blog at http://blog.zerosum.org.

Berube is a Ruby developer, trainer, author, and speaker. He’s used both Ruby and Ruby on Rails for several years, starting in 2003 when he became a Ruby advocate after he wrote about the language for Dr Dobb's Journal. Prior to this he worked professionally with PHP, Perl, C++, and Visual Basic.

His professional accomplishments include creating the Ruby on Rails engine for CoolRuby.com (http://coolruby.com), a site that tracks the latest Ruby developments, and working with ThoughtBot (http://www.thoughtbot.com.) on the Rails engine that powers Sermo America's Top Doctor contest. Additionally, he has worked on several other Ruby projects, including the engine powering CyberKnowHow's BirdFluBreakingNews search engine, and he also created the Slueshi text adventure game system, a multiplayer text game engine written in Ruby.

David's journalism has been in print in over 65 countries, in magazines such as Linux Magazine, Dr Dobb's Journal, and PHP International Magazine. He's also taught college courses and spoken publicly on topics such as "MySQL and You" and "Making Money with Open Source Software."

He lives in New Hampshire and his hobbies include basketball, yo-yos, and sleep.