Bartlett Publishing has put together several lists of books available from many various publishers which are essential reading for anyone interested in the topic. Check them out today!
You can view the articles from the blogs which preceded these at the following URLs:
Rails 2.1.0 has, among other things, one very cool feature - named scoping.
class Whatever < ActiveRecord::Base
named_scope :active, :conditions => { :active => true }
end
Whatever.active #yields all active whatevers
Whatever.active.find(x) #only runs find() on active whatevers
You can even have parameters that get passed in through anonymous functions. It's a very powerful mechanism, and makes everything much more beautiful. Learn more here.