This book covers topics such as installing Ruby, Rubygems, and Rails on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X; choosing and installing a database; installing an IDE for Rails development; setting up a Subversion repository to manage your code; creating a new Rails application; understanding Rails models; understanding controllers and views; improving user interfaces with Ajax; using Rails plugins to manage file uploads; using Capistrano to manage application deployment; techniques for scaling Rails applications, such as caching and using Apache to proxy through to the Mongrel server.