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The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

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Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional Average Customer Rating: Average rating of 4.5/5Average rating of 4.5/5Average rating of 4.5/5Average rating of 4.5/5Average rating of 4.5/5

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The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.117
EAN: 9780321445612
ISBN: 0321445619
Label: Addison-Wesley Professional
Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 912
Publication Date: 2007-11-26
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Studio: Addison-Wesley Professional
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Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5
Summary: Excellent Book - Not for Beginners
Comment: I'm fairly new to Rails, and for the past few months I've been working through a lot of "Intro to Rails" books, and others where you build a big project over the course of the book. The materials are all excellent, but they did leave me with a lack of understanding. Often, with Rails, I would do something, like create two models, create associations, etc., and it works for me...but I really didn't have any idea how it was working.

That's where this book helps tremendously. There are not large examples for development, but it tells you what Rails is doing under the hood, how it's doing it, and why. It's a wonderful book for those looking for a deeper understanding.

Of course, it's definitely not for complete beginners. You should already know how to do at least the basics with Rails (particularly the console), and it would help to have a base understanding of Ruby.
Customer Rating: Average rating of 4/5Average rating of 4/5Average rating of 4/5Average rating of 4/5Average rating of 4/5
Summary: Good author, bad publisher
Comment: This is a good book that could have been better with a better publisher. I'm very disappointed with Addison Wesley here.

First, the production quality of this book is horrid. If I had picked it up physically in a book store, I would have never bought it. The paper is thick and heavy, yet cheap, like elementary school construction paper. I have books of equal page numbers that are a centimeter thinner. I literally took a razor blade to mine and split it in two so I could carry it around to read it (that's how committed I was to reading it, which says something for the content :-). For anyone interested, splitting it exactly at Chapter 12 works without it falling apart.

The editing was horrid too. Somewhere between the copy editor and the technical reviewers, someone should have caught the repetition. As an author myself, I know how hard it is to review your own work, especially when it comes to wordiness and repetition. So I don't blame the author, but the editing/reviewing process. The editors/reviewers should have also caught some of the continuity problems, starting with the very first chapter. When I started reading the book I had about a year of Rails experience and had read about 3 other Rails books. While I read the first chapter, I was thinking: "Wow... how lost are Rails noobs right now?"

Next, there are 30 pages of fluff at the beginning of the book. Again, not likely a decision of the author, but filler inserted by publishers. By comparison, The Ruby Programming Language (O'Reilly) has 5 pages before the first chapter. There is also over 100 pages of API reference, which were outdated the second the book hit the shelves. Again, I cannot imagine Obie actually suggesting this, and I know how pushy publishers are. Note to Addison Wesley: There's this really neat thing called the internet where we go for up-to-date API references now!

Finally, this is not a Rails 2.0 book. This is where I truly sympathize with any author of a technical book. Writing books takes a damn long time and is very hard. It's often the case that the technology changes by the time the book is finished. But that does not mean that a publisher should LIE on the front cover on the book. Of course, Rails 2.0 is mentioned in the book. But so many things from the migrations to the ActiveRecord discussion were not even Rails 1.2! Some of the soft information and suggestions were still worthwhile, but it still isn't Rails 2.0. So to put a big "Covers Rails 2.0" stamp on the front is borderline dishonest... at most, it "mentions 2.0 sometimes".

This is still a good book and a worthwhile read. Under almost any other publisher it is a 5 star book. The star lost is at the hands of Addison Wesley (I wanted to take two, but Obie doesn't deserve that). I hope a second edition comes out that covers all of these production quality issues, thus putting a better frame around a worthwhile piece of work.

Customer Rating: Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5Average rating of 2/5
Summary: Not a good way to start with Rails
Comment: This book does a poor job of connecting the dots. This book probably won't work for you if you are just starting out with Rails.
Customer Rating: Average rating of 4/5Average rating of 4/5Average rating of 4/5Average rating of 4/5Average rating of 4/5
Summary: Best I've seen (which isn't to say it's great)
Comment: I picked this up purely on the basis of Zed Shaw's endorsement of Mr. Fernandez as one of the few non-stupid Rails proponents out there, and for the most part I'd agree with these sentiments. While it is completely unsuitable for anyone who is completely new to web development or the Ruby language, it is very suitable for anyone else who wants to skip all the evangelical sycophantry that plagues other Rails related titles and jump straight into the meat of the framework.

I still don't like a lot of things about Rails, and I don't like a lot of things about this book, but it is by far the least painful way to get acquainted with the project I've seen to date, allowing the reader to formulate their own educated opinion on these matters relatively quickly.
Customer Rating: Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5Average rating of 5/5
Summary: The Essential Guide
Comment: This is *the* rails book to get. Even if you're an experienced Rails developer, you'll find loads of great information and advice. The real-world examples are really helpful. Includes an excellent tour through the framework itself. This is one of the few Rails books that covers testing well. Obie is obviously a Jedi.
  
Editorial Reviews:

The expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications

 

Ruby on Rails strips complexity from the development process, enabling professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value. Now, for the first time, there’s a comprehensive, authoritative guide to building production-quality software with Rails. Pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez and a team of experts illuminate the entire Rails API, along with the Ruby idioms, design approaches, libraries, and plug-ins that make Rails so valuable. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails’ tools and best practices to maximize productivity and build polished applications users will enjoy.

 

Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails’ key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does– and how to make it behave the way you want it to.

 

This book will help you

Increase your productivity as a web developer

Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails

Learn what’s new in Rails 2.0

Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec

Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers

Leverage Rails’ support for designing REST-compliant APIs

Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques

Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing

Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping

Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications

Incorporate logins and authentication into your application

Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own

Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer

Choose the right Rails production configurations

Streamline deployment with Capistrano

 

 
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