Section 1.1. Who This Book Is For

1.1. Who This Book Is For

This book will help you use Rails for building richly interactive web applications with Ajax. It provides comprehensive reference and detailed examples for every JavaScript method that Rails offers, as well as its JavaScript-generating methods. More than just recipes, you'll also get a thorough, low-level understanding of what's happening under the hood. And beyond the how-to, we'll spend time considering when Ajax is (and isn't) appropriate and the trade-offs associated with it.

This book is written for developers who have experience building for the Webworking knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is assumed. Using Rails will require some use of the command line, so you should be familiar with those facilities of your operating system. If you are new to Rails, this book provides a quick introduction, the big picture, a walk through the installation process, and some tips on getting started. But to develop full applications, you'll benefit from a good guide to Ruby itself, as well as the other Rails components. Fortunately, there are many great tutorials and references available online and in print to fill those needs, and we'll point you to the best.

If you have started working with Rails and seek to deepen your skill set, this book will do just that. You'll find dozens of examples drawn from real-world projects, exhaustive reference for every relevant feature, and expert advice on how to "Ajaxify" your applications.