Book excerpt: Ruby on Rails offers developers the opportunity to create fully-featured web applications in double-quick time. Rails and e-commerce are a match made in heaven and Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce is the first book to directly target this market. The book explains, via real-life scenarios, how to use Rails to create every aspect of an online store – from creating a product catalog, to building a reliable shopping cart system, all the way to features and functions like customer feedback forums. This combination of high sophistication and broad focus makes this an essential working reference – the book all developers are calling for.