Ruby on Rails® Bible

Chapter 8. Developing Book Shelf: Social Support

In this chapter you will complete the development of the Book Shelf Web application. With that in mind, there is a great deal to accomplish in this chapter. In the past two chapters, you have added support for users and basic book support. A user can log in, search for books, add books to their shelf, remove books, and view a book detail page. Now you turn your focus to adding features that make the application more fun and interesting to use in a community environment. These features are commonly known as social features and are a trademark of Web 2.0 applications.

If you want to follow along with the development in this chapter, you can continue working with the code that you developed in Chapter 7, or you can download the complete Chapter 7 source code from www.rubyonrailsbible.com.

Adding Social Support

In this chapter, you will continue development of the Book Shelf application by adding some popular social features to the application.

• Tagging: Organize your books by keywords.

• Reviews: Give users the ability to post reviews for any books in a database.

In addition to these features, I will also get you started on how to implement a ratings system that allows users to attach a rating to a book. The good thing is that these features are common to many Web applications, and therefore you can take advantage of code that has already been written, saving yourself some time and effort. You'll use Rails plugins for the implementation of tagging ...