Bruce Williams - The Rails View: Creating a Beautiful and Maintainable User Experience

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We have many people to thank for making this very ambitious book possible.

First of all, as this is a book about Rails, a lot of credit must go to the creator of the framework, David Heinemeier Hansson, the members of rails-core (past and present), and other contributors. The ideas in this book are distilled from years of discussion and collaboration with the Rails and Ruby communities.

Throughout our careers weve drawn inspiration and motivation from a number of web luminaries, and we would be remiss in failing to mention at least a few of them: Dan Cederholm, Molly Holzschlag, Paul Irish, Jeremy Keith, Steve Krug, Eric Meyer, Jakob Nielsen, Mark Pilgrim, and Jeffrey Zeldman.

We were surprised to learn that a number of people actually volunteered to read the book before it was complete, thereby putting their own sanity at risk. Wed like to thank these brave souls for their help in identifying issues, suggesting topics, and otherwise vastly improving the text: Derek Bailey, Kevin Beam, David A. Black, David Bock, Daniel Bretoi, Jeff Casimir, BJ Clark, Jeff Cohen, Justin Dell, Joel Friedman, Jeremy Hinegardner, Mark Margolis, Dan Reedy, Sam Rose, Loren Sands-Ramshaw, Diego Scataglini, Tibor Simac, Charley Stran, Mark Tabler, and Lynn M. Wallenstein.

This book simply would not have been completed if not for our amazing editor, Brian Hogan. He continuously challenged our preconceptions and helped to clarify our intent, all with seemingly unbounded patience and class. And we promise, Brian, well never again utilize utilize in our writing (except for that time right there).

Many thanks to Rich Kilmer, Chad Fowler, Aaron Batalion, and our colleagues in the engineering, design, and product teams at LivingSocial. You keep us hungry to win every day, constantly building pressure to innovate, which makes us better designers and developers.

John would like to thank his supportive wife, Whitney, for her patience and encouragement throughout the process; his parents, grandparents, and extended family for their love and support and for purchasing that Mac SE back in the day with Hypercard installed; all the members of #caboose for their patience and discussion over the years; Justin Hankins and Sara Flemming for all the years of experimenting in HTML, CSS, and Rails with Meticulous; and Amy Hoy for an intense year of business, design, and development boot camp while running Hyphenated People with him. He also thanks Bruce for agreeing to be a coauthor so that this book could rise to its potential.

Bruce credits the care and support of his wife, Melissa, and his two sons, Braedyn and Jamis, for the uncharacteristic level of determination and attention hes managed to focus on this single project, which broke any number of personal records. Also, Bruces life would have turned out very differently were it not for the love of his mother, Monique, and father, Bruce (the elder), and a varied and distributed family hes proud to call his own, even if they do occasionally call him for tech support. To his coauthor, Bruce offers an equal share of sincere thanks and rampant design skill jealousy. Some things do not change. Finally, Bruce would like to dedicate his work on this book to the memory of his brother, Tristan Eppler.

John Athayde & Bruce Williams

March 2012

john@therailsview.com | bruce@therailsview.com

In 2004, Rails was born and the web discovered the MVC (model-view-controller) pattern in earnest, which brought a whole new level of productivity and fun to a world of developers and designers.

Youll find no end of books that provide a firm foundation for writing controllers and models (which benefit greatly from being written top-to-bottom in plain Ruby), but when it comes to viewsthat meeting place of Ruby, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (not to mention developers and designers)whats a disciplined craftsman to do?

This book aims to widen the discussion of Rails best practices to include solid, objective principles we can follow when building and refactoring views. By the time youre finished reading, youll understand how you can structure your front end to be less brittle and more effective and boost your teams productivity.