Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome explanations, gotchas, May 30, 2009
This review is from: Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition (Paperback)
Summary: Great book after you've learned the basics of RoR.
I'm writing this review because I disagree strongly with some of the previously submitted reviews that rated this book poorly.
This IS the book I'd HIGHLY recommend to anyone with a programming background who has gone through intro-level RoR books and online tutorials and wants to delve deeper into understanding the framework, in terms of gotchas, tips, recommended coding practices, etc.
When I go to a book store and pick up a book, I skim through it, look at the content, and see if the author(s) covered important or complex topics with an appropriate level of detail. This book nailed that part. Even in skimming the book for 5 minutes, I found explanations for several issues I had run into while learning RoR. E.g. with a has-one / belong-to relationship between 2 models, when does the relationship get saved if you associate the parent in the child, or associate the child to the parent? Things like that, which are relevant to programmers build real applications, are invaluable to know.
One thing that makes the book excellent is how well it explains options and their tradeoffs for implementation of functionality. E.g. there is an excellent writeup on the options for managing session data.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Still a "Must Have" For Those New to Rails, June 8, 2009
This review is from: Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition (Paperback)
I don't remember earlier versions of this book getting slammed quite like this one. Maybe it's simply because there's more competition around. Regardless, I still think this is "the" Rails book to get if you're just starting out, or want a refresher on some of the main areas of Rails.
It's gotta be hard to put out a book against such a fast-moving target, and to their credit I think they did a pretty good job - for example, they were able to sneak in a description about named scopes.
My main gripe is that REST has been adopted by the Rails community for quite some time, and I think the tutorial should have been rewritten to reflect this, i.e. it could have done wihout the "add_to_cart", "who_bought", etc. actions in the controllers.
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but not ideal, May 15, 2009
This review is from: Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition (Paperback)
I've made it through most of this book and while it has some good coding examples it lacks thorough explanations. If you've got a solid background in development and have done a little research on Rails you'll pick up the content without too much suffering. I've been developing Java for 3 years with little to no web experience and I feel like I could struggle through my own project at this point, but there are better books out there.
I would suggest starting with Rails Foundations 2 and moving to this book later. The Foundations author does a superb job of explaining the rails framework, ActiveRecord, views, and controllers in the 1st 7 chapters before jumping into building an application. Overall that book and Simply Rails 2 strike a better balance between application development and instruction.
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