Rails for PHP Developers kick-starts your Rails experience by guiding you through learning both Ruby and Rails from a PHP developer’s perspective. Written by developers with deep experience using PHP, Ruby, and Rails, this book leverages your existing knowledge of PHP to learn Rails application development quickly and effectively.
As a PHP developer, you have some great tools for developing web applications. Ruby on Rails is another key tool to add to your web development toolbox. Rails is a high-level web development framework that emphasizes high productivity and clean code. However, the Ruby language and Rails framework take a different approach from the way many PHP developers write applications.
Authors Derek DeVries and Mike Naberezny tell us, “Ruby lies at the foundation of Rails, and we’ll teach you the Ruby language from the beginning by building on your existing foundation of PHP. We’ll explore Ruby through parallel code examples that illustrate the differences between the languages, and help you understand the Ruby idioms and how they differ from popular PHP code and style.”
You’ll then learn the Rails framework by iteratively building a complete application, starting from the home page through to a finished product. Along the way, you’ll build your skills as a Rails developer by learning the Rails fundamentals such as MVC structure, domain modeling, and testing.
In addition to serving as a guide to learning both Ruby and Rails from a PHP developer’s perspective, this book includes two extensive reference chapters. They map the most common PHP tasks to their equivalents in the Ruby and Rails world, giving you at-a-glance information that you’ll refer to often.
This great reference will also show you how to:
- Leverage PHP knowledge to learn Ruby on Rails quickly
- Understand key differences between Ruby and PHP
- Learn Rails best practices and relate them to PHP
- Develop techniques for writing effective Rails code
Derek DeVries, vice president of design for Maintainable Software, leads design, branding, and user experience for the company. He is a Zend Certified PHP Engineer with more than five years of experience leading PHP development teams. In his spare time, Derek develops SportSpyder.com, a Rails application for finding the best new sports articles on the Web.
Mike Naberezny is the founder of Maintainable Software. He has more than ten years of software engineering experience. Mike's PHP experience includes holding a senior position at Zend Technologies, and he sits on the Zend PHP Education Advisory Board. Mike heads engineering at Maintainable, where he has developed and deployed a number of Rails applications. He contributes to several open source projects.
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