Preface

Maybe every Ruby developer who is familiar with Rails knows what Rake is. However, many of them are unaware of the complete power of this tool and its real aim. The goal of this book is to improve this situation.

Have you ever had to perform boring, repetitive tasks while deploying your project? I assume here that a project is not only something written in Ruby or another programming language, but it can also consist of operations with files. For example, it might be a book or the documentation of a project that you are writing in Markdown and then compiling into HTML. Or it can be compiling a lot of files to one package. Have you ever wished to build a project or run tests on a project whenever it undergoes a change? All this stuff is easily made possible by programs called software management tools. Rake is one such program.

Rake was initially implemented as a Ruby version of Make—a commonly used build utility. However, calling Rake a build utility undermines its true power. Rake is actually an automation tool—it's a way to put all those tasks that you perform under the project into one neat and tidy place.

Basically, build automation includes the following processes:

Rake can be used in all these situations, and this book shows you how Rake performs all the steps. After reading this book, you will know Rake better and be able to write more clear and robust Rake code.