1. Chapter 1 Starting Up Ruby on Rails

   1. Getting Started in the Online Cloud: Heroku

   2. Getting Started with Instant Rails

   3. Getting Started at the Command Line

   4. What Server Is That?

   5. Test Your Knowledge

2. Chapter 2 Rails on the Web

   1. Creating Your Own View

   2. What Are All Those Folders?

   3. Adding Some Data

   4. How Hello World Works

   5. Protecting Your View from the Controller

   6. Parentheses Are (Usually) Optional

   7. Adding Logic to the View

   8. Test Your Knowledge

3. Chapter 3 Adding Web Style

   1. I Want My CSS!

   2. Layouts

   3. Setting a Default Page

   4. Test Your Knowledge

4. Chapter 4 Controlling Data Flow: Controllers and Models

   1. Getting Started, Greeting Guests

   2. Application Flow

   3. Keeping Track: A Simple Guestbook

   4. Finding Data with ActiveRecord

   5. Test Your Knowledge

5. Chapter 5 Accelerating Development with Scaffolding and REST

   1. A First Look at Scaffolding

   2. REST and Controller Best Practices

   3. Examining a RESTful Controller

   4. Escaping the REST Prison

   5. Test Your Knowledge

6. Chapter 6 Presenting Models with Forms

   1. More Than a Name on a Form

   2. Generating HTML Forms with Scaffolding

   3. Form As a Wrapper

   4. Creating Text Fields and Text Areas

   5. Creating Checkboxes

   6. Creating Radio Buttons

   7. Creating Selection Lists

   8. Dates and Times

   9. Labels

   10. Creating Helper Methods

   11. Putting the Form Body in a Partial

   12. Test Your Knowledge

7. Chapter 7 Strengthening Models with Validation

   1. Without Validation

   2. The Original Model

   3. The Power of Declarative Validation

   4. Managing Secrets

   5. A Place on the Calendar

   6. Beyond Simple Declarations

   7. Test Your Knowledge

8. Chapter 8 Improving Forms

   1. Adding a Picture by Uploading a File

   2. Standardizing Your Look with Form Builders

   3. Test Your Knowledge

9. Chapter 9 Developing Model Relationships

   1. Connecting Awards to Students

   2. Connecting Students to Awards

   3. Nesting Awards in Students

   4. Many-to-Many: Connecting Students to Courses

   5. What’s Missing?

   6. Test Your Knowledge

10. Chapter 10 Managing Databases with Migrations

    1. What Migrations Offer You

    2. Migration Basics

    3. Inside Migrations

    4. Test Your Knowledge

11. Chapter 11 Debugging

    1. Creating Your Own Debugging Messages

    2. Logging

    3. Working with Rails from the Console

    4. The Ruby Debugger

    5. Test Your Knowledge

12. Chapter 12 Testing

    1. Test Mode

    2. Setting Up a Test Database with Fixtures

    3. Unit Testing

    4. Functional Testing

    5. Integration Testing

    6. Beyond the Basics

    7. Test Your Knowledge

13. Chapter 13 Sessions and Cookies

    1. Getting Into and Out of Cookies

    2. Storing Data Between Sessions

    3. Test Your Knowledge

14. Chapter 14 Users and Authentication

    1. Installation

    2. Storing User Data

    3. Controlling Sessions

    4. Classifying Users

    5. More Options

    6. Test Your Knowledge

15. Chapter 15 Routing

    1. Creating Routes to Interpret URIs

    2. Generating URIs from Views and Controllers

    3. Infinite Possibilities

    4. Test Your Knowledge

16. Chapter 16 Creating Dynamic Interfaces with Rails and Ajax

    1. Ajax Basics

    2. Supporting Ajax with Rails

    3. Managing Enrollment through Ajax

    4. Moving Further into Ajax

    5. Test Your Knowledge

17. Chapter 17 Mail in Rails

    1. Sending Text Mail

    2. Sending HTML Mail

    3. Sending Complex HTML Email

    4. Receiving Mail

    5. Test Your Knowledge

18. Chapter 18 Securing, Managing, and Deploying Your Rails Projects

    1. Securing Your Application

    2. Deploying Rails Applications

    3. Test Your Knowledge

19. Chapter 19 Making the Most of Rails—And Beyond

    1. Keep Up with Rails

    2. Plug-ins

    3. Ruby

    4. Web Services

    5. Explore Other Ruby Frameworks

    6. Migrating Legacy Applications to Rails

    7. Keep Exploring

1. Appendix An Incredibly Brief Introduction to Ruby

   1. How Ruby Works

   2. How Rails Works

   3. Getting Started with Classes and Objects

   4. Comments

   5. Variables, Methods, and Attributes

   6. Logic and Conditionals

2. Appendix An Incredibly Brief Introduction to Relational Databases

   1. Tables of Data

   2. Databases, Tables, and Rails

3. Appendix An Incredibly Brief Guide to Regular Expressions

   1. What Regular Expressions Do

   2. Starting Small

   3. The Simplest Expressions: Literal Strings

   4. Character Classes

   5. Escaping

   6. Modifiers

   7. Anchors

   8. Sequences, Repetition, Groups, and Choices

   9. Greed

   10. More

4. Appendix A Catalog of Helper Methods

   1. Calling Helper Methods

   2. ActiveRecordHelper

   3. AssetTagHelper

   4. AtomFeedHelper and AtomFeedHelper::AtomFeedBuilder

   5. BenchmarkHelper, CacheHelper, and CaptureHelper

   6. DateHelper

   7. DebugHelper

   8. FormHelper, FormTagHelper, and FormOptionsHelper

   9. JavaScriptHelper

   10. NumberHelper

   11. PrototypeHelper

   12. RecordIdentificationHelper

   13. SanitizeHelper

   14. ScriptaculousHelper

   15. TagHelper

   16. TextHelper

   17. UrlHelper

5. Appendix Glossary

   1. Speaking in Rails

6. Colophon

The animals on the cover of Learning Rails are tarpans (Equus ferus ferus). The tarpan was a wild horse that lived in Europe and Asia and died out in the 19th century. Smaller and stockier than a modern domestic horse, it was mouse-gray in color with a dark mane and a black stripe down its back. The breed was known to be intelligent, curious, and independent.

The ancient tarpan ranged from southern France and Spain to central Russia. Its decline was caused by the growth of the European human population in the 17th and 18th centuries, which encroached on the tarpan's natural habitat. Tarpans were also hunted for their meat. The last wild tarpan died in the Ukraine in 1879, and the last pure tarpan died in a Russian zoo eight years later, at which point the species officially became extinct.

However, you can still see a tarpan today, thanks to two German zoologists who succeeded in genetically recreating the breed in the 1930s. Heinz and Lutz Heck began a breeding program while working at a Munich zoo, believing that genes still present in the gene pool of an overall species could be used to recreate extinct breeds. They combined the genes of living horses who showed similar characteristics to the ancient tarpan, and bred the first modern tarpan at the zoo in 1933. This new form of tarpan, known as the Heck horse, is a phenotypic copy of the original wild breed, meaning that it resembles the ancient tarpan but is not exactly the same genetically. Today, there are about 50 tarpans in North America, all of which trace back to the original project in Munich. Most of them are owned by private breeders who are trying to increase the tarpan population. There are not many more than 100 tarpans in the world.

The cover image is from Richard Lydekker's Royal Natural History. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSansMonoCondensed.