Michael Hartl's book stands out because he keeps it current, a challenge given fast-evolving Rails development practices. Last year I set out to create a set o

Michael Hartl's book stands out because he keeps it current, a challenge given fast-evolving Rails development practices. Last year I set out to create a set of example apps to bridge the gap between Michael Hartl's excellent tutorial and the piecemeal advice found on experts' blogs and Stack Overflow. The example apps are accompanied by tutorials (walkthroughs, really, not as thorough or informative as Hartl's book) and show how to set up a Rails app with authentication libraries (either Devise or OmniAuth), RSpec, Cucumber, and popular options such as MongoDB or Haml. Each has a companion application template that serves to generate a starter app. Like Michael Hartl, my contributors and I have seen increasing interest in Twitter Bootstrap and recently updated the app templates to offer a choice of front-end frameworks, including Zurb Foundation and Twitter Bootstrap (either Less or Sass versions). It seems Twitter Bootstrap for the front end is catching on -- fast -- for the same reasons Rails has succeeded on the back end: convention over configuration and a well-crafted implementation of commonly-used functionality. Here are the RailsApps example apps, now with Twitter Bootstrap: http://railsapps.github.com/ http://railsapps.github.com/