Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Hands down the best technical book I've ever read
Comment: This book was hands down the best technical book I've ever read. Through some kind of magic voodo, the Dave Thomas has written a book that is accessable and enjoyable to read for both novices and experts alike.
For its tiny footprint, it covers everything you could need to know about Ruby, and the Rails framework. Its style is light and has just enough humor to make it fun without overdoing or making it hard to follow it like some other books (*cough*Programming Perl*cough*.) I really liked that their running example was a "real world" shopping cart rather then something very abstract like a "Gilligans Island" or some other silly nonsense.
Even if you have no interest in Ruby or Rails, and even if you think the whole platform is a bunch of overhyped rubbish (it is not by the way), you should still buy this book just to know what a good technical book should be.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The real agile way to develop web applications
Comment: Rails, or more appropriately Ruby on Rails is the new web application development framework that everyone is so excited of and raving about how it cuts development time by a factor of 10 and does away with the cumbersome XML configuration files that are the hallmark of J2EE.
Being an old Java hand, I wanted to see firsthand if there was some substance beneath all the hype. I was also intrigued by the fact that many other old Java hands whom I respect and admire, like James Duncan Davidson, Elliotte Rusty Harold, Bruce Tate, Graham Glass, and Brian McAllister are now fervent (to different degrees) rubyists and Rails-enthusiasts. If it weren't for them, I would never have undertaken this journey, probably.
But anyway, this is supposed to be a book review, not a chronicle of my ongoing discovery of Rails.
I mostly like using books to discover and learn about new technologies, so it's perfectly natural that I decided to take off with what is considered the book about Rails. And how could it be not, with Rails' creator David Heinemeier Hansson as one of its authors?
It is also the only one published so far but, even though the choice was a bit, uhm ... limited, I wasn't disappointed. The book, as is customary with titles from The Pragmatic Programmers' bookshelf, is very good. It lays down in detail almost everything you need to know to be productive with Rails, save for the language Ruby itself. To be honest, the book includes an appendix introducing the basics of Ruby, but it's just the bare minimum. I suggest getting yourself a good Ruby book (like Programming Ruby, also from The Pragmatic Programmers, which I am currently reading and will review shortly) if you really want to get the most out of Rails.
Another caveat you have to be aware of is that Rails is a quickly moving target. The book covers version 0.13, which was current around mid-2005. There was a 0.14 version after that and we are now at 1.0, since a few weeks ago. However, I didn't find I had much to change while experimenting with Rails following the book. As always with Open Source software, resorting to the mailing lists, forums or the #rubyonrails@freenode.net IRC channel is the best avenue for finding answers to your doubts and asking support questions.
The book is organized in four parts:
Part I introduces the design principles behind Rails, its most important concepts and briefly covers how to get started by installing it and writing your first program. The part about installation is the one that is bound to become quickly obsolete, as new and easier installation methods for the various supported platforms are developed.
Part II dives into Rails by guiding you along the development of a real (albeit much simplified) e-commerce application. I find this approach to be very good and "pragmatic" indeed. Of notable interest is the chapter on testing. It's great to see that providing a good test scaffolding was one of the main design concerns in Rails and not just an afterthought.
Part III goes deeper into Rails and can be used as a reference for its components, like Active Record, Action Controller, and Action View. Bonus chapters on AJAX, Web Services, security, deployment and scaling issues are included here and will make the book even more valuable when you need to deal with "real world" applications.
Part IV contains the appendices, like the above mentioned introduction to Ruby, a reference of configuration parameters (be warned again: these might change), the full source code for all samples (of dubious value, in my opinion), and a list of online resources (once again, a list bound to be more and more incomplete as time passes and the excitement around Rails grows).
Overall, I find the quality of this book to be excellent. It's not thick to the point of being too heavy to carry around in your laptop bag, for those times when you need to peek at it, yet it covers enough of Rails to be considered a complete and authoritative reference. This is probably a testament to Rails' simplicity too.
The writing style is eminently readable. You can read it cover to cover, if you like, without getting bored. The frequent sidebars make it lively without being too distracting. A great amount of care and craftsmanship went into producing this book, and it shows.
Highly recommended!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Buy this book now
Comment: If you're a web programmer, buy this book right now. Do it. Now.
Rails has been hyped a lot, so I won't add to it. I'm just gonna tell you what I know from working with it myself.
You know how pretty much every webapp has to do the same things, over and over? There's a template system you have to set up. There's session storage. There's almost certainly a relational database, and you have to work with its data in your business logic. There's forms, and input validation. I could go on and on.
Rails helps you deal with this repetition of code in two ways:
1. It gives you great code to do many common tasks, out of the box. Some, like sessions, just work, with literally zero configuration needed. Others need a line or two. If you'd like, you can write your own code - roll your object-relational mapping layer if you really feel like punishing yourself - but if you don't have legacy systems to talk to, it's very easy to use the wonderful built-in code.
2. It provides a well-structured framework and set of tools to let you focus on writing your business logic, rather than the mechanics of getting the code to run. Grunt-work is almost nonexistent. Example: rather than needing to explicitly call for a certain template to be displayed, Rails defaults to the template of the same name as the current action. That's only one line saved, but it's more flexible - rename files, and nothing breaks - and the savings really add up.
Note the common thread between the two: providing you with the basics out of the box, so you can focus on your business logic. Rails, and the larger Ruby community, places a very high value on programmer time, and so it'll try to save you from writing "obvious" code or repeating yourself. It does a darn good job.
People in the real world have seen twenty to one code reduction going from J2EE to Rails. Twenty to one. Think about that.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great First Edition, could still use some work
Comment: I fell in love with Rails after trying it about a year ago, so I when I learned that DHH and Dave Thomas would be writing a rails book, I signed up for the beta right away. The finished product a fantastic introduction to rails, and if you're serious about learning it, there's really (literally!) no other choice. This book will be your constant companion for months.
But the danger with any computer book published before its subject goes 1.0 is that it will be out of date, and that's somewhat true in this case. Near as I can tell, everything in the book still works, but any new features added since 0.13.x are missing.
It's also a so-so reference. I find that plenty of times I have to go to the online api docs to answer a question that the book doesn't touch, or covers lightly. I suspect that will suit some people just fine, but I like a real, comprehensive dead-trees reference book. Perhaps now that 1.0 is here and the APIs are stable, we'll see something like that.
In the end, despite growing pains, this is one book any rails developer would do well to keep at the ready. Recommended and looking forward to the second edition.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for the Java Programmer
Comment: I just read the first few chapters (and the last few) and I found it to be very, very good. I'm not about jumping on the bandwagon (I'm a Java programmer), but it is neat to see how someone built an MVC architecture from scratch and his detailing behind it. He tries to take everything in consideration and covers a whole lot in a well written book. I wrote my own MVC architecture for a Content Management System and a few other apps. I found myself wishing that I read this book a couple years ago while patting myself on the back for getting most of it right. Whether you use Rails, Java, or something else, I believe there is a lot of great philosophy here behind the Ruby/Rails code.
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