'Ruby on Rails: Up and Running' covers everything thoroughly, from building a schema and making a simple controller to designing a Rails interface and building a project model -- including details on how to add a controller and generate scaffolding. More advanced material is provided to help developers Map data to an imperfect table, traverse complex relationships, and build custom finders. A section on working with Ajax and REST shows them how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic, user-centric web pages using built-in JavaScript and Ajax support. This book also explains the essentials of logging to find performance problems and delves into other performance optimising techniques.