Chapter 5. A Working Sample

Ruby on Rails is astounding. Using it is like watching a kung-fu movie, where a dozen bad-ass frameworks prepare to beat up the little newcomer only to be handed their asses in a variety of imaginative ways.

—Nathan Torkington, O'Reilly Program Chair for OSCON

The first two chapters provided an overview of Rails, and the last two gave you a good taste of what programming in Ruby is like. In this chapter the action begins and you start creating a simple blog engine in Rails. It's admittedly not a very original project, but it's a great example for learning Rails' basics. It's simple enough to be explained in a chapter or two, and substantial enough to explore a lot of Rails concepts and how to apply them in practice to write real Web applications.