Dan Chak’s Blog

It’s time to let the proverbial cat out out of the bag (meow!). Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a book for O’Reilly Media called Scaling to Enterprise with Ruby on Rails.

This book teaches you how to think like a architect and therefore it picks up where other Rails books leave off. What do I mean by that?

Most books out there teach you how to use tools: Ruby the language, Rails the framework, or Rails plug-in xyz. These books are great if you’re reading them purely to learn syntax.  Syntax is one thing; how you put everything together to make a site scale to millions of users is quite another thing altogether.

Also, this book is not focused exclusively on Ruby/Rails.  There’s a lot of theory in building enterprise web sites that doesn’t map directly into Ruby statements. Examples of such topics are schema design, different caching techniques and when each is appropriate, and service oriented architecture. These are all questions of web architecture, and the concepts are true independent of the language or framework choice.  In the end (and in the book), the theory does translate into Rails code, but a lot of time is devoted to exploring the theories themselve.  Armed with the why in addition to the what, you can make intelligent design decisions in your own projects.

The topics in this book will not be new to seasoned web software architects. However, there’s a new spin on old tried and true ideas, as the ideas will finally make their way into the Rails community discussion. This is a book for beginners (who have at least read the Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development With Rails books), intermediate, and advanced Rails users alike. I’m looking forward to feedback, especially once we start posting Rough Cuts online.