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A few years ago, there was no Rails rescue business. The framework was young, the developers were few, and the applications were being written by early adopters. As a group, the early Rails developers were by and large at the top of their profession.

But things have changed since then. After all the great press that Rails got in its early days, its popularity soared. Thousands of new developers began coding in Rails. Sadly, some of them didn’t really know what they were doing. Others, through no fault of their own, ended up on projects with unrealistic deadlines or impossibly tight budgets, and were forced to cut corners.

The result: there are some substandard Rails applications out in the wild now. There are applications that don’t run at all, applications where the tests bear no relation to the code, applications with crushing performance issues. Some of these applications are destined for the bit bucket. But others are prime candidates to be rescued - and that’s where you, with the help of this book, can come in.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years working with Rails projects that were written by other people. Sometimes I’ve come on as a subcontractor to an existing codebase, sometimes I’ve taken over when another developer got bored or fired, and sometimes I’ve been asked to do a code review.

Over the course of these engagements I’ve come up with a strategy for getting up and running on a new-to-me Rails codebase quickly. And in the cases where I’ve found serious issues, I’ve come up with ways to mitigate them. If you’ve inherited (or even created) a Rails problem, don’t despair! Help is at hand.

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You can see the Table of Contents or download a Sample Chapter on this site, or buy the book via Lulu.com. Feel free to email me if you have any questions or comments.

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