Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) [Paperback]

Sam Ruby (Author), Dave Thomas (Author), David Heinemeier Hansson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1934356549 | ISBN-13: 978-1934356548 | Edition: Fourth Edition

Ruby on Rails helps you produce high-quality, beautiful-looking web applications quickly. You concentrate on creating the application, and Rails takes care of the details.

Tens of thousands of developers have used this award-winning book to learn Rails. It's a broad, far-reaching tutorial and reference that's recommended by the Rails core team. If you're new to Rails, you'll get step-by-step guidance. If you're an experienced developer, this book will give you the comprehensive, insider information you need.

Rails has evolved over the years, and this book has evolved along with it. We still start with a step-by-step walkthrough of building a real application, and in-depth chapters look at the built-in Rails features. This edition now gives new Ruby and Rails users more information on the Ruby language and takes more time to explain key concepts throughout. Best practices on how to apply Rails continue to change, and this edition keeps up. Examples use cookie backed sessions, HTTP authentication, and Active Record-based forms, and the book focuses throughout on the right way to use Rails. Additionally, this edition now reflects Ruby 1.9, a new release of Ruby with substantial functional and performance improvements.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who is a co-chair of the W3C HTML Working Group and has made significant contributions to many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source software projects. He is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the Emerging Technologies Group of IBM.

Dave Thomas, as one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, understands agility. As the author of "Programming Ruby," he understands Ruby. And, as an active Rails developer, he knows Rails.

David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of the Rails framework.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; Fourth Edition edition (March 31, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934356549
• ISBN-13: 978-1934356548
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #44 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Object-Oriented Design
  • #47 in Books > Computers & Technology > Home Computing > Internet
  • #50 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development > Programming

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The near de-facto edition to your Rails library, with one caveat, June 5, 2011

By 

Shannon (St. Charles, MO United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) (Paperback)

I only got into Ruby on Rails in the last year and have been incredibly impressed with it and enthusiastic to grab any book I can to increase my knowledge of it. I was told that Agile Web Development with Rails was "the" Rails book to own, but the only problem was that the fourth edition was not out yet. I looked through a first edition at the local library, but took it with a grain of salt as I knew a lot of that information was outdated, and so, the wait continued and other Rails books I checked out. Finally, this was released and I have now read through the entire book.

It is a little unique over Rails books due to the order of things. Where all the other books tend to start off explaining all the features, terms and and functionality behind the framework and starts working you through a demo app later on, Agile Web Development goes in the opposite direction as it starts you out immediately building the demo app, then the second half of the book goes into the specifics of Rails in more details. As anyone who has read any other edition of this book will already know, you will be building a demo app of a e-commerce store. Although it's not to completion, that's not really the point of it; the app will take you through a handful of different Rails 3 details and by the time you're done reading - or building along - you should have a fairly good grip on how to do different things in Rails. Once in a while, people in the Rails community like DHH and others will chime in with thoughts and tips.

It's a little hard for me to review this book as a complete stranger to Rails, as I have read through other Rails books prior to this. But while I might be more of a fan of the Apress Beginning Rails book, what was great about Agile Web Development was that I still was learning new things like stuff I didn't know you could do in migrations, formatting helpers, etc. So my time with this book was well spent and I am glad to have this on my shelf. Probably the only ones I would not recommend this book to is advanced Rails programmers, especially as they may already own an older edition of the book and I feel they would have caught up to speed on the Rails 3 changes by now. So for the most part, newbies only.

However, I have to point out one thing. This book took a while getting out to market and only appeared a few short months ago, and already it may be outdated...kind of. Rails 3.1 is coming - likely by the time you read this - and there are some new additions that this book won't even cover, such as the new asset pipeline, changes to migrations, SASS and Coffeescript. On the other hand, it's not like the information in this book is suddenly worthless, 99% of it will likely still apply to your projects. It's just something to keep in mind as you're reading this book; I recommend finishing this book then hopping on the web and watching a few Railscasts on Rails 3.1 to fully catch you up.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars NOT a beginner's book!, July 3, 2011

By 

Alex - See all my reviews

This review is from: Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) (Paperback)

Agile Web Development gets marketed as the ultimate beginner-to-intermediate guide to developing using Ruby on Rails. I think its target audience is solidly in the intermediate camp. Starting out as a beginner by reading this book will leave you more lost than enlightened.

Rails is powerful because of the conventions it pre-assumes. For those who understand the conventions -- why they exist, why they are better than the alternative, etc. -- Rails is a dream to use because it does all the behind-the-scenes work for you. But for beginners, seeing things like ":attr_accessor" or the "_path" notation in "link_to" is just downright confusing right off the bat.

Though I find the book well-written and useful now that I'm at that intermediate level, I'm giving it two stars because of all the time I wasted reading and re-reading its passages while I was learning Rails.

I found beginner's intros to Rails available on the web [...] indispensable to give me background BEFORE reading this book.

My suggestion to the authors is to more fully flesh out explanations of all of Rails' conventions, particularly routing, passing variables from method-to-method, and linking models together. Additionally, I think the authors should initially code their examples even less concisely and then work down to make things more concise.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as Good as Previous Editions and Obsolete, July 19, 2011

By 

Josh - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) (Paperback)

I've been programming on Rails for a while now and originally started on the previous edition of this book. When learning Rails for the first time the previous edition was indispensable. It started you off with the shopping cart application which was great and helped me to learn fast. After you completed the shopping cart application, the previous edition went into just the right amount of depth regarding the various components of Rails. For example, it had pages explaining each type of relationship (has_many, has_one, join tables) in detail with the various methods that were added and how to use each.

In the new edition, a very substantial portion of the in depth explanations are missing. It no longer is able to serve as a handy reference for me as the previous edition had done.

Additionally, Rails 3 is changing fast and might not settle down for a little while. A good portion of this book is obsolete. For example, this book still teaches readers to use the Prototype library even though Rails is switching to jQuery in 3.1. Additionally there are numerous other large changes in Rails 3.1 that are not mentioned in this book that will be essential for future Rails developers.

To the author's credit, they opted to release this book at a difficult time since Rails is changing rapidly, however I wouldn't recommend this book at this time. Its probably a better bet to buy the earlier edition for dirt cheap and then watch Ryan Bates' Railscasts to get up to speed for Rails 3.