Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great intro and approach
Comment: The book takes a two-part approach to describing RoR. In the first 8 real chapters (5-12), the Daves use a gradual build-up a storefront application with incremental and increasingly complex functionality to show RoR's capabilities and flexibility. Walking through these helps you get some hands-on experience with the framework. The next 10 chapters go through the various aspects of the Rails framework and describes how RoR does its thing. Besides the core functionality, the book also covers Security, Caching and performance, and testing.
A good framework lets you do the most common things easily (do simple things simply!), while also letting you override the default behavior to implement your own logic. I appreciated this book's approach in following this flow, first showing you how to do simple things, and then explaining how to bypass or override parts of the framework's assumed formalisms.
I bought this book in tandem with the Programming Ruby book, having been away from programming for many years and not knowing Ruby at all. I would recommend that you at least get acquainted with Ruby first, but after that, it's an easy read. I developed my first basic AJAX app using RoR in little time, mainly using the book but sometimes needing to go to the web for more info.
I haven't read any other books on Ruby, but for an introduction to RoR, this one is very good.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not dry like your typical programming book
Comment: I won't repeat what others have said but the fact that it was a joy to read the book. The writing style was definitely entertaining and informative and for anyone who wants to jump into RoR programming, this SHOULD be the first book to read. I come from a J2EE development background and skeptical at first but this liberated a lot of my biases against RoR.
Customer Rating:
Summary: is the perfect way to start playing with RoR
Comment: David Heinemeier and Dave Thomas are the authors of this book. Heinemeier has created the Rails framework. Dave Thomas has written the Programming Ruby book and is one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. I need to say more? Ok, I'll try...
First of all, be advised: you could read these book by knowing nothing about the Ruby language, but you shouldn't. It'll be hard, believe me. So before you start your adventure on RoR applications, learn at least the bases of Ruby. Well, you can read the Programming Ruby book, by Dave Thomas, it's a soft initiation.
Now, assuming that you have learned Ruby before reading these book, Agile Web Development with Rails is the perfect way to start playing with RoR. It's expose practical examples and have interesting comments, and tips, about all the Rails framework syntax (or something pretty close). Agile Web Development with Rails is very didactic, easy to understand, and comes with a lot of real examples. You will learn fast, you will learn right.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A beautiful introduction to a beautiful technology... but wait for the second edition
Comment: I just read the beta version of the second edition cover to cover in just a couple of days, and I love it, the content as well as the exposition. The first edition only gets four stars, though, because the second edition contains a lot of updates worth waiting for. Even in its rought beta state it's a great resource, and I'm looking forward to seeing the finished book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: second edition expected for fall 2006
Comment: Would have been 5 stars, but ...
Wait for the second edition. Ruby on Rails has changed very much.
If you (as of this writing) search for the ISBN (0977616630) of the second edition, Amazon will "find" the first edition (ISBN: 097669400X).
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