This is a hands-on book with plenty of well-explained code. Each chapter has a standalone project in which a complete web application with specific features of a social networking site is emphasized. The final chapter of the book is a project that has a complete and fully developed social networking site. Each chapter begins with a brief description of the features of the Internet service and the market it is within. After extracting the main features of the service, the chapter goes into explaining how a clone of the service can be designed, followed by a short description of the technologies and platforms being used. The bulk of the chapter goes into describing how the clone is built, with step-by-step explanations and code examples. Finally, the chapter shows how the finished clone can be deployed on the Internet. This book is written for web application programmers with an intermediate knowledge of Ruby. You should also know how web applications work and you have used at least some of the cloned Internet services before. If you are a trying to find out exactly how can you make your very own customized applications such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook, this book is for you. Programmers who want to include features of these Internet services into their own web applications will also find this book interesting.