The Rails View: Creating a Beautiful and Maintainable User Experience

Working in the View layer requires a breadth of knowledge and attention to detail unlike anywhere else in Rails. One wrong move can result in brittle, complex views that stop future development in its tracks. This book will help you break free from tangles of logic and markup in your views as you pick up the practical skills you need to implement your user interface cleanly and maintainably.

You’ll discover how to build up solid, sustainable layouts and popular interface elements with semantic HTML5 and CSS3, and when you can responsibly generate markup and use advanced presenters… all without leaving the designers on your team out in the cold. Widen your appeal with responsive design, and discover how new progressive enhancement techniques can take you beyond the “weakest link” approach of the past. Master the asset pipeline introduced in Rails 3.1 and use Sass and Coffeescript to make your interface code shorter and more enjoyable.

You’ll create elegant, well-structured views that are a joy to build on. You’ll appreciate its comprehensive, objective guidance in a realm full of subjective opinions.

What You Need:

All examples in the book assume Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9.x are installed. Detailed information on how to install these for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux is included in the book.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Creating an Application Layout
Chapter 2. Improving Readability
Chapter 3. Adding Cascading Style Sheets
Chapter 4. Adding JavaScript
Chapter 5. Building Maintainable Forms
Chapter 6. Using Presenters
Chapter 7. Handling Mobile Views
Chapter 8. Working with Email
Chapter 9. Optimizing Performance