Rails 3 Reading Material

Rails 3 is going to bring a lot of new stuff to the table. Wouldn’t hurt to organize some reading material in categorized and chronological order. So here goes whatever I scavenged so far. Leave comments so I can add more links or if I should mark something as obsolete .

Router

• Revamped Routes in Rails 3 (12/20/09) — Examples of usage of the Rails 3 router.
• Generic Actions in Rails 3 (12/20/09) — Interesting things you can do with Rails 3 routes.
• The Rails 3 Router: Rack it Up (12/26/09) — A description of important design decisions made for the new Rails 3 router.

ActiveRecord

• ActiveModel: Make Any Ruby Object Feel Like ActiveRecord (01/10/10) — Learn about the ActiveModel API.
• Let your SQL Growl in Rails 3 (01/17/10) — A neat trick and an example on how to use Rails 3 subscription models.
• Active Record Query Interface 3.0 (01/22/10) – The new ActiveRecord API (based on ARel) thoroughly explained.

Controllers

• Dynamic session expiration time in Rails 3 (01/16/10) — An insight on how Rails 3 handles session cookies and a convenience plugin.
• Render Options in Rails 3 (01/18/10) — Those render methods you call in your controllers: learn about their options in Rails 3.

ActionMailer

• New ActionMailer API in Rails 3.0 (01/26/10) — ActionMailer now shares lots of logic with controllers, learn its new API.

Views

• SafeBuffers and Rails 3.0 (02/01/10) — Learn about html_safe strings in Rails 3.0.

Generators

• Making Generators for Rails 3 with Thor (01/15/10) — A thorough tutorial on how to create, gemify, and test Rails 3 generators.
• Discovering Rails 3 generators (01/18/10) — A few important points to know about Rails 3 generators.

Running Rails 3 App

• Spinning up a new Rails app (12/31/09) — One of the first posts on how to spin up a new Rails 3 app.
• Rails 3 and Passenger (01/17/10) — A few tips on how to run Rails 3 on passenger.
• Rails 2 & Rails 3 side by side (01/28/10) — Juggling both versions of rails on the same system (check comments too).
• From Zero to Rails3 on Windows in 600 seconds (01/30/10) — Get a Rails 3 app running on Windows.

Upgrading to Rails 3

• Upgrading an Application to Rails 3 — Part 1 (01/17/10) — Learn how to upgrade your Rails 2 app to Rails 3.
• Migrating a Rails App from 2.x to 3.0 (01/17/10) — Another tutorial on steps needed to upgrade your Rails app.
• Notes from the field upgrading to Rails 3 (01/20/10) — Thanks to bugmash there are now a few of these upgrade guides.
• Getting Up To Speed With Rails 3 (01/22/10) — Good article on upgrading to Rails 3 and deploying with capistrano and passenger.
• The Path to Rails 3: Approaching the upgrade (01/26/10) — Second part in series on understanding Rails 3, this one focusing on upgrade of existing app.
• rails-upgrade: Automating a portion of the Rails 3 upgrade process (01/29/10) — Third part where a plugin is introduced to help automate the upgrade.
• rails-upgrade is now an official plugin (02/01/10) — rails-upgrade is now an official rails tool (as in it sits under github.com/rails and rails team takes part in maintaining it).

Plugin/Gem Compatibility

• Rails Bugmash 2010 (01/16/10) — Notes on how to get certain popular gems/plugins to run on Rails 3.
• Notes from Rails 3 bugmash (01/17/10) — Another set of plugin/gem compatibility notes and Rails 3 discoveries.
• Rails 3 Plugins and Gems — this wiki page lists major plugins and gems which have been verified to be Rails 3 compatible (or not).

Overall Architecture

• My Five Favorite Things About Rails 3 (08/18/09) — Early view on what’s getting into Rails 3
• The Path to Rails 3: Introduction (01/20/10) — A detailed description of architectural changes in Rails 3 (with pics).

Yehuda Katz Series on Rails 3 Progress

• Rails and Merb Merge: The Anniversary (Part 1 of 6) (12/23/09) — On refactoring Rails components for modularity.
• Rails and Merb Merge: Performance (Part 2 of 6) (12/29/09) — On improving rendering/routing performance.
• Rails and Merb Merge: Plugin API (Part 3 of 6) (01/11/10) — On API for plugin developers.
• Rails and Merb Merge: Rails Core (Part 4 of 6) (01/22/10) — On refactoring Rails core for modularity.