New Book on Building Social Networks with Rails

Written by experts Michael Hartl and Aurelius Prochazka, Railsspace is currently available by pre-order on Amazon or as a rough-cut on Safari Books. According to the book’s overview, Railspace

“focuses on using Rails to build a large database-backed Web application–precisely the kind of application for which Rails is perfectly suited. The application built in this book is a social-networking site like Facebook or MySpace. This represents four principal advantages. First, social networking is a hot topic and is currently generating a high degree of excitement. Second, a social networking application is a big undertaking, giving the authors a chance to show off the many features Rails has to handle large, complex projects, including the Model-Controller-View (MVC) architecture, automated testing, and code refactoring. Third, the authors have extensive experience with this type of application: Michael Hartl cofounded a company to develop sports applications with a strong social component, and Aurelius Prochazka was a founder of ArsDigita, a pioneer in the development of social networking sites. Finally, the step-by-step tutorial approach allows users to see Rails as it is actually used, resulting in learning by example.”

Finally, a complete roadmap for those hoping to build the next mySpace or Youtube. I’ve ordered a rough copy from Safari and will give you some impressions after reading it.