As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others) meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones) bulleted lists one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph) the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion half the word count (or less) than conventional writing

Users detested "marketese"; the promotional writing style with boastful subjective claims ("hottest ever") that currently is prevalent on the Web. Web users are busy: they want to get the straight facts. Also, credibility suffers when users clearly see that the site exaggerates.

"I have a science degree and my wife since then has got a science degree as a midwife. I was open to both ideas so I looked into it.

“Nobody is talking about preventing the legalization. The legalization is going to happen. That means the following will happen: First comes the legalization. Then come the measures to secure the border. And then comes the process of permanent residence.”

Baer, Boebel and several other Austin entrepreneurs — including Rony Kahan, founder and CEO of Indeed.com, and Dan Graham, co-founder and CEO of BuildASign — invested $800,000 to open Capital Factory’s new 22,000-square-foot home.

Blazemeter’s SVP Digital Marketing Ophir Prusak explained his biggest lesson learned from this test,”Leads don’t convert to customers.  Leads convert to conversations!”

REST architecture favored in Rails applications (Box 2.2), which means representing data as resources that can be created, shown, updated, or destroyed—four actions corresponding to the four fundamental operations POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE defined by the HTTP standard (Box 3.2).

People were highly inclined to skip the introductory blah-blah text in newsletters. Although this text was only three lines long on average, our eyetracking recordings revealed that 67% of users had zero fixations within newsletter introductions. Eyetracking heatmap of users reading a newsletter. Notice the emphasis on reading the first two words of the headlines.

When it comes to customer relationships, newsletters must be seen as a long-term investment: they work their magic over time. On the strategic level, this is why you should emphasize value-added publishing instead of simply spamming too-frequent newsletters to any email address you can lay your hands on.

By comparing encrypted values instead of raw passwords, we will be able to authenticate users without storing the passwords themselves.

VALID_EMAIL_REGEX=/\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i

To really learn about regular expressions, though, I consider the amazing Rubular regular expression editor (Figure 6.4) to be simply essential.

Regular expressions consist of a terse (some would say unreadable) language for matching text patterns; learning to construct regexes is an art,

If your test suite is mysteriously breaking, be sure to try running rake db:test:prepare to see if that fixes the problem.

Active Record allows us to impose such constraints using validations.

using attr_accessible is important for preventing a mass assignment vulnerability, a distressingly common and often serious security hole in many Rails applications.

a model represents a single user, whereas a database table consists of many users.

Rails has a feature called migrations to allow data definitions to be written in pure Ruby, without having to learn an SQL data definition language (DDL).

Following the conventional REST architecture favored by Rails, we’ll call the action for new users new and pass it as an argument to generate controller to create it automatically

Sass is a language for writing stylesheets that improves on CSS in many ways.