Ruby on Rails is the revolutionary online programming tool that makes creating functional e-commerce web sites faster and easier than ever. With the intuitive, straightforward nature of Ruby and the development platform provided by Rails, you can put together full-fledged web applications quickly, even if you're new to web programming.You will find a thorough introduction to both Ruby and Rails in this book. You'll get the easy instructions for acquiring and installing both; understand the nature of conditionals, loops, methods, and blocks; and become familiar with Ruby's classes and objects. You'll learn to build Rails applications, connect to databases, perform necessary testing, and put the whole thing together to create real-world applications such as shopping carts and online catalogs--apps you can actually use right away.