Active record basics

i am reading Agile Web D. with Rails and i have some noob
questions about it. i’ve gone through the depot application with hardly
any problems and now i’m reading through the chapters that explain some
of the deeper facets of rails.

on chapter 14 it starts talking about active record. all the sudden,
it’s showing examples of how to connect to the database. other than
setting up the database.yml file, i never had to do that before. is it
just showing how to do it for the sake of doing it, and the connection
code is taken care of somewhere else when you generate your rails apps,
or is this something that i’m going to have to do on occasion? it also
has code before the connection that require different gems in the
application. i never had to require those when working through the depot
application though.

on top of that, it also starts talking about this library called pp. i
have no idea what it does other than displaying data from the database.
but we displayed it from the database in the depot app… again, why do
i need this? i just wish there was a little more documentation for
someone like me. i’m trying to digest the book slowly so i can
understand as much as i can.

maybe my answers are staring me right back in the face, but i don’t see
them and i am a little confused. sorry for the noob questions, but
thanks in advance for your help

josh

after further reading, it does say that the prefered way of data
connection is through the database.yml file. so that answers one
question. i still don’t understand the pp stuff.

http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/pp/rdoc/files/pp_rb.html