Getting intimidating looking at /config files in projects at github, is there a book that covers this?

Question

I'm looking at some open source apps on github, specifically the files in the /config folder like:

boot.rb, application.rb, etc.

They seem too complicated!

Is there a book that details all of this?

I'm finding the basics easy to understand, but configuration, setup is always a tricky part and a solid book on these topics would be great.

Answer 1

Agile Web Development With Rails is pretty much the gold standard. There are some other good resources listed in this SO thread.

Answer 2

If you are only interested in the config files, those are discussed usually throughout a Rails book, such as database.yml in the introduction chapter, and routes.rb in the Routing chapter.

The other important ones are: environment.rb and the 3 files under environments folder, one for each of production, development, and test. These six files are some of the most often used ones.

A Rails Guide section that talks about config is:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html

It may be good to learn it step by step to get a good foundation. A free online tutorial is at

http://railstutorial.org/book
http://railstutorial.org/

There are lots of high quality Ruby on Rails screencast too:

http://railscasts.com/
http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts

To get a complete folder from GitHub, you can first install git, and then do a

git clone http://github.com/nex3/haml.git

and you will see a new folder in the current directory on your hard drive, with everything in the project in that folder.