Part IV Distributed Programming with Ruby on Rails

When I came up with the idea for this book, I intended to make it strictly about “pure” Ruby. I had no intention of including any chapters that were specific to Ruby on Rails. However, after thinking about it, I realized it would be hard not to include the next couple of chapters. They focus on tools that work only within a Ruby on Rails environment, but they are so helpful that I would be remiss if I did not include them. They also demonstrate a few interesting architectural points worth discussing.

If you use Ruby on Rails, there is no reason for you not to read this part of the book. The tools in this part can help your Ruby on Rails applications scale and be more efficient and easier to code. You might already know about these tools, but I am convinced that I have written about aspects of the tool you probably don’t know about. Or perhaps you thought the tool was doing something one way, when in fact it does it the opposite way. Understanding your tools better can help you write better code, which, in turn, makes for a better and more stable system.

Even if you don’t use Ruby on Rails daily (some people who use Ruby don’t use Ruby on Rails at all), I still recommend that you read this part of the book. You might find inspiration to write a “pure” Ruby port of these tools. Or you might contribute to them so that they can be used with your favorite Ruby framework. Or you might find a good reason buried in there to start using Ruby on Rails.