As a .NET developer, you’ve probably heard the buzz surrounding Ruby on Rails. It’s true: Rails enables you to create database-driven web applications with remarkable speed and ease. And like many other open source projects, Rails has been most easily adopted by individuals and organizations already immersed in the open source community. That means, as a Microsoft developer, you face unique challenges learning not just Rails but all the open source technologies that go along with it. This book will be your guide as you navigate this new terrain. For a .NET developer, learning Rails is as much about the cultural and philosophical shifts in thinking as it is about the technical learning curve. In this book, we hope to break down some of these barriers for you. We have learned a lot of valuable lessons from Rails that we’ve applied to our .NET development too; if you take anything away from this book, it will be a new way of thinking about software development— the Rails way. this new terrain. For a .NET developer, learning Rails is as much about the cultural and philosophical shifts in thinking as it is about the technical learning curve. In this book, we hope to break down some of these barriers for you. We have learned a lot of valuable lessons from Rails that we’ve applied to our .NET development too; if you take anything away from this book, it will be a new way of thinking about software development— the Rails way.