Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: A dyed in the wool PHP programmer looks at RoR
Comment: I have been wanting to do a project on an official MVC architecture for some time now. In my own free-range PHP coding I have attempted to use MVC principles by templating (views) and segregating all implementation code into classes (models) but of course this relies on strict self discipline. On the other hand, I have seen some MVC systems that are extremely rigid and limit what you can do to certain well-known models. Nothing I do ever conforms to well known-models, because if it did I probably wouldn't do it.
Let's see what Dave and Dave can do for me. The first section of the book is organized as follows: Chapter 1 introduces the book, talks about what is Agile, and gives the typographical semantics. Chapter 2 gives a nice little schpiel on what is MVC. Believe it or not the theory has been around since 1979! Chapter 3 is the "How to install Rails" chapter, and Chapter 4 sets you up with a "Hello world" app. The instructions are easy to follow, and I did everything like it said, and everything seemed to work, until Hello World. I could not get the WEBrick server to serve up the "Hello world" page on my Fedora Core box. I understand it is quite a pain to make Rails talk to Apache so I won't even go there until I have something for production. I was able to use a UML instance remotely. So although I have no desktop and it's very slooooow, Rails installed there with absolutely no hassle and works like a champ. The installation section of this book needs a bit more distro/platform specific troubleshooting, and I don't think they should even mention Apache at this point.
On to Chapters 5-11: building an app. This part of the book really shines. In a chatty, casual and ideally agile style, they guide you through building a simplified shopping cart app from scratch, illustrating general Rails principles as they go. You can follow along by downloading a glomp consisting of the tutorial examples versioned by chapter. This style of tutorial best suits my personal learning style.
Then we get to Chapter 12 on tests. Rails generates the skeleton of the test and the test suite for you automatically. You still have to come up with the tests and the assertions, and the hardest part of all is the fixtures--that known state from which you can predict what should happen when you do X. Fixtures are especially hard with a data driven application where the dataset is constantly mutating. The long and the short of it is: You need a totally virgin database that you put the same carefully concocted initial data in when you run each test. Rails has this baked in: Each rails project automatically builds itself a dev database, a production one, and a testing one. You test every little thing at the micro level and you run the tests over and over. If something fails, it helps you get to the source a lot quicker. If you didn't have these tests, problems could propagate into far flung sections of your application and you have to painfully sleuth out the cause of them. Been there. Done that. I'm a believer.
In practice, I fired up the unit tests right out of the examples and they borked all over me. Turns out there was a fundamental non backwards compatible change in the way they work... But finding Mike Clark's blog was tremendously helpful. Following his instructions, updating the database and the tests to the new way was easy, and after that they worked like a champ.
After Chapter 12 on testing, the book becomes more systematic and dry--like other technical reference books.
Chapter 13 fills you in on the structure of rails. 14 and 15 systematically lay out the correspondences between the Active record class and RDBMS concepts. 16 explains the logic behind rails magic, and takes a look behind the scenes. 17 fleshes out the presentation (view) layer of the MVC trinity. 18 touches on Ajax, 19 is about Email the rails way. 20 is all on Web Services. What would a web programming book be without a chapter on security (21) and 22 talks about scaling out and real world issues. Finally we have Appendix A that introduces the Ruby language. This inclusion was invaluable for me because I did not know Ruby previously. The other appendices are useful as well: B is a list of the configurations, C is a list of the source codes for the Depot App, and D is resources and Bibliography.
Errors: I am holding the first printing in my hand. There have been two more since. They believe in frequent updates and small runs. Pragmatic had an errata on their website and man was it large--so large it was hard to use. I wish the errors would have been filterable by severity. But without it I would have sunk.
All in all, the book was a positive. Building the depot app gave me hands on with the concepts so that when I later come along and read the dry complete reference part it will be attached to something I've done. I totally recommend the book, but get the latest version.
Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the best computer languages book's
Comment: I do hate reading computer language book's, i just use them as consulting guides. Butthis one is different. It's easy to read, and in one week you'll have read it till the end withount having noticed.
It's also a good starting point for those wo don't have an idea of web applications programming. From the veri first page you will be able to do useful things (not that crappy "hello world" only, you'll be doing really interesting things in no time).
Customer Rating:
Summary: great book
Comment: this book is a great walkthru of RoR and a must-have if you are planning on creating rails apps. you can't help but get excited reading this book, and once again, dave thomas proves he writes a great book.
buy this book (and the pix axe book) if you are getting into RoR
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Very helpful
Comment: While the book takes a sometimes overly casual tone (depending on your taste), it serves as an excellent introduction to Rails (as well as to the Ruby programming language). Indeed, it follows the programmer's maxim of learning by example; each chapter focuses on the continuing development of an actual web application.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Exactly what I was expecting
Comment: This book has been wonderful. It goes into detail on all of the aspects of Ruby on Rails and builds an example web application using quick iterations to build functionality. I feel confident that I can jump into Ruby on Rails and be productive right away. I definitely recommend this book.
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