RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails™

Chapter 1. Introduction

RailsSpace teaches you Ruby on Rails by developing a real-world application: RailsSpace, a social networking website aimed at the Rails community itself. We take you step by step, from the virtually static front page, through user registration and authentication, up to a highly dynamic site with user profiles, image upload, simple blogs, full-text and geographical search, and a friendship request system. Though certainly not intended as a serious competitor to the social networking heavyweights, RailsSpace is not a toy; it’s designed to show how to use Rails to make a web application suitable for deployment into a production environment.

1.1. Why Rails?

Ruby on Rails is a tool for making web applications—and it’s freakishly ...