The book is particularly well suited to those with little or no experience with web application development, or who have some experience but are new to Rails. Early chapters introduce the "Rails way" and walk through installation of Ruby and Rails. The rest of the book takes readers on a tour of the components of the Rails framework through the creation of a working application. Focus is on features used most often, rather than arcane details. Two chapters are devoted to the Active Record. Appendices offer an introduction to Ruby for those new to programming, and an introduction to relational databases for those new to data-driven applications. Because Rails development is driven by a community of open source developers, a final appendix describes Rails mailing lists, wikis, blogs, podcasts, and the Rails IRC Channel. Readers should be familiar with the technologies that make up the web, including HTML, and should be comfortable installing software. Hardy and Carneiro are web developers. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read Less