Active Record Basics

Active Record, which controls the interaction between your application and the database, is the heart of Rails. Active Record's elegant simplicity almost completely eliminates the need for configuration; in this chapter, you'll see how Active Record's conventions reduce your configuration from hundreds of lines to a handful. You'll also see how Active Record's metaprogramming dynamically adds capabilities to your classes, based on the contents and structure of the database. Finally, you'll use Active Record's elegant extensions of Ruby to quickly validate your code with less effort than ever before.