Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: 70+ Rails Tidbits In One Book!!
Comment: 'Rails Recipes' by Chad Fowler is a wonderful book filled with 70 recipes which will automatically improve your Rails skillset and no doubt get you programming faster and better than ever before!!
Pragmatic is never going to win any awards for layout of their books, but the content within more than makes up for the drab interior. I can't list out all 70 tidbits here but I will give the breakdown of chapters:
User Interface Recipes (13)
Database Recipes (17)
Controller Recipes (10)
Testing Recipes (4)
Big-Picture Recipes (22)
Email Recipes (4)
If you use Ruby on Rails and want to be able to accomplish common tasks without rewriting code that already exists, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book and improve your efficiency the moment you turn the front cover over. Wonderful book, great size, solid writing make this an EASY recommendation.
***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Comment: There are tons of useful recipes in this book. It is a must purchase if you are new or intermediate to rails.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Valuable Tool
Comment: Visuals:
Nothing terribly exciting visually. Use a "web / recipe card" looking tab design for sections & headings. Type face and size is standard and readable.
Readability:
Generally not a cover to cover type book. The book consists of 70 sections, some larger "recipes" and some shorter "snack recipes". The majority of the recipes include: Problem, Ingredients (gems, etc..) and Solution. These short standalone sections provide for easy reading.
Practicality:
[...]If you find a few topics that sound applicable to your current project, or that sound useful for a future project - I'm sure you will find this book to be very practical. If it saves you half an hour of searching the Internet, I imagine it probably was worth the investment.
For example, I found the topic of "Versioning Your Models" to be of real practical use. The information was presented clearly and I could immediately put it into use on a current project.
If you already know how to solve all these problems, or just are not interested in them, well then this book won't be very practical for you.
Audience:
According to the book the target audience are developers already familiar with the basics of Rails, looking to see how an experienced Rails developer would solve a specific problem. The book successfully meets that intended target.
Overall:
It is a usefull tool for a working Rails developer. Most topics are not terribly complex, but may help to make you aware of solutions that you had not previously considered. Personally, it won't be a "keep on your desk" or "use every day" type book - but I am glad to have it on my bookshelf.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A top-notch title, but /please/ give us more testing recipes!
Comment: I am a novice Rails programmer, that much is certain. As a result, I'm quite happy to have Chad Fowler's "Rails Recipes" by my side. I have been part of the beta program for this book, so I've been reading it in parts for the past few months. It has been impressive, to say the least. As an author of my own "recipes" book, I am interested to see other authors' version of the recipe format, just in case I am able to incorporate something they do into a future book of my own. While Rails Recipes hasn't taught me much about writing a recipes book, it has taught me an awful lot of great things about Rails.
I look forward to using Chad's recipes in my current projects. I already have a couple of ideas, including prettying up my URLs and creating a custom form builder. If I had one criticism, it's the relative paucity of testing recipes. Writing Rails applications test-first is still a struggle for me, and I know there are those from whom I can learn. I would like the opportunity. (How many of you would like to come to Toronto to teach me?) I suppose I'll have to write a few testing recipes of my own.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A real page turner
Comment: Receipt books are a different breed. By their nature they are difficult to just sit down a read and as such I find them sort of tough to review. Some years back I got into baking bread. All my receipts came out of James Beard's "Beard on Bread". I love the book, but I must say there are many parts of the book I have never looked at and others with lots of flour between the pages. The nature of a receipt book is you need to make something, you look it up, make what you need, and put the book away. Not this book.
Chad Fowler's book is something quite different. Fowler has a very comfortable and engaging writing style. In this way his book is more like a nice collection of short stories. I found myself reading one receipt after another, even if I knew I had no intention of using it anytime soon. When I did find myself trying out receipts, I found them thoughtfully organized and very easy to follow.
In recent years I've shyed away from programming receipt books, since I have found many to be really dry reading, or filled with lots of esoteric receipts I have no intention of implementing or interest in even trying as an exercise. I'm pleased I gave this receipt book and chance since it's a breed apart.
Does it have everything I'd like to see in it? No. Does it have some things I will probably never use? Yes, but surprisingly few, and who knows, these receipts seem so practical that I would not be surprised if some day I really did find that I have used most of them. I recommend this book to anyone who is serious about improving their Rails skills.
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