Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, Thorough and Easy
Comment: This book, for me, was fantastic! Real world examples for the win! I am still not finished with this book, only half-way through it but, I have to say I have never been as excited about a book than I am about this one.
The very beginning chapters get a functional website application up and running called Depot (an on line book store) and they do this in such a way that you don't have to know the Ruby language (no, it's not scaffolding). As long as you can understand how gears work and fit together and that one turns clockwise and another turns counter clockwise, I don't think you'll have a problem.
With that being said, without knowing Ruby, you may be able to get by on making your own application from scratch but, it will be very rough. The purpose of this book is to teach you about Rails, not Ruby.
My recommendation is, read this book first, before a Ruby book. That way, seeing the Ruby code will be much easier to take in after you see how it works in Rails and to syntax used. Do NOT skimp on learning Ruby after you read this book! You will be sorry! There are TONS more to learn just by learning the language itself. There is more than one way to skin a cat and by learning the rest of the language, you will be more empowered to figure out problems on your own.
The only problem I had with this book was that, in the middle of chapter 5, it skipped back to chapter 3 and finished out chapter 5, chapter 6 and half of chapter 7 was missing. This is the printer's fault, not Amazon's or Pragmatic Programmer's fault. If you happen to get a messed up book, don't contact Amazon, it takes forever. Instead, I contacted Pragmatic Programmer via email and let them know of the situation and to my surprise, they sent me a brand new book still in plastic, priority mail which took about 2 days to get to me! I was just expecting maybe the missing chapters in PDF format but, this shows a lot of character on the part of the company (Pragmatic Programmers). My email was responded to in less than 45 seconds after I hit the "send" button. I would like to offer much praise to the company for this!
If you are a PHP developer, there is another framework that has been modeled after Ruby on Rails called CakePHP. It is fairly new and under heavy development but, the basic principals are the same. The only reason I am plugging them here is, without having learned this framework, I don't think I would have thought about looking at Ruby on Rails. For a super quick breakdown of how MVC pattern works. Be aware that Ruby on Rails is much easier. I think this is due to the nature of PHP and not the framework itself. The devs try their hardest to make it easy for you.
I guess I don't have anything else to say about this except, if you do buy this book, you will not be disappointed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great beginners resource
Comment: This book is a great resource for newbies to Ruby on Rails. Actually build a working product and learn while you do it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Book and best Seller
Comment: nothing to say, the book is awsome. and the Amazon with the delivery too. and now im waiting for the Programming ruby book, (bought in amazon too).
Is the best book of ruby on rails. the best to begining!....
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful and maddening at the same time
Comment: Edit: With the release of Rails 2.0 this book is too outdated to be of much value.
First off, if you want to do some dynamic web design RoR is definitely the way to go. Many languages and frameworks claim to handle the messy details so you can work on the application, but are exaggerating, at best. RoR delivers that promise. If you have a little programming experience, you can rip through the first 5 chapters in an hour or two, and have something useful built in very short order.
This book is well written, it is clear and lets you do some fairly impressive things early on, with little effort. The problem is that so many important details are glossed over. Perhaps rails is so good that it hides too many details. It is possible to write a non-trivial application using AJAX, XHTML, mySQL, and of course ruby, without actually understanding any of them.
Maybe this is a good thing, but I am of the school that thinks that a programmer needs to understand the underlying ideas to effectively leverage the higher level API's. But it is very impressive that it is possible to create non-trivial applications without a solid knowledge of Ruby. Try using JSP without understanding Java!
This approach is good for a beginner, because she isn't spending weeks doing lame hello world type projects, but it will also limit what they can do, because they will be tied to scaffolding, and if they ever need to do something in another language, they will be lost there also.
It is maddening for people with some programming experience because they are asking questions that the book doesn't answer. But it is still useful and enjoyable, it gets your feet wet and puts you on the path of creating good rails applications. The book also at least partly tongue in cheek, explains some things away as magic. Things like this make it hard for me to take this book seriously.
I would love it if they created two books out of this one book. One for beginners, and one for more experienced programmers. Books that cater to both often leave one of those two groups in the cold on any given page.
The deployment section is too narrowly focused, and another 30 pages or so would have been more useful to more people. It also points out the main problem with Rails, IMO. It can be difficult to effectively deploy apps on production servers. Not that JSP containers are much simpler, no crappy XML config files to wrestle with and you don't have to install a full blown server like you do with JSP to test on your machine. WebBrick is a very small and very efficient testing platform.
Another major problem is that much of the code examples simply do now work. A lot in the CRUD sections fail, there is not nearly enough information on using SSL in rails, the has and belongs to many examples, etc. Some of these problems may be due to the ever changing nature of rails, but not all of the problems.
Still, this book is a great introduction to what I hope is a framework that will take hold and grow over time. I have no idea how well RoR scales in enterprise projects, but at least for basic and some not so basic web applications, nothing comes close to Rails.
Despite my grumbling, I recommend this book. The first 12 chapters are an excellent tutorial, the remaining book is boring and often misleading or wrong. If you want a serious treatment of this topic, try The Rails Way.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book on Rails
Comment: I would recommend this book to beginner and intermediate rails users. The first half of the book walks you through building a very simple rails application to get some hands on experience then the second half includes everything you need to know about rails. The second half is an invaluable reference for me. Some prior programming experience will give you a huge head start but is not mandatory.
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