Customer Reviews

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

the feel i get from the pragmatic guide on Rails is: do this and do that. It gives you a lot of fragments of knowledge, without a very complete big picture, and without a complete explanation of what's going on. I tend to learn from the big picture and then going down to the details, and understand why in each step, so this book is not for me.

Originally, I meant to use this book to learn Rails. For some reason though, I could not quite get through the material - I think that the example application (the famous depot code ) was not something I particular care for at the time, so I ended up using the Learning Rails book from O'Reilly to start learning how to build Rails apps. Then I went and did something for a while.

When I got back into Rails, I again went to the Learning Rails book and started to build a web app, however, I felt like I should be able to do more with the app I built, so I started to search around various Rails web sites, as well as the Rails API documentation; at some point, I started to refer to the Agile book again. That is when I started to understand why its so popular.

Details on Active Record / Views? Check.
Pagination? Check.
Time Zones? Check.

In fact, I think I would have saved myself a lot of time on research if I have just look up the details I wanted to know in the book. That, I believe, is the strength of this book - not only it will give you the basics of building Rails, but it will go into depth as to WHY and HOW Rails works.

Not to say that Learning Rails book is bad - I think I did better with the Learning Rails through that book and I recommend that publication to anyone getting into Rails. At the same time, if you want to get beyond the basics, you will save yourself a lot of time on research by just going through the Agile book. If nothing else, get both books.

First let me say that so far this has been an awesome book with the exception of one thing, it's written for Ruby on Rails 2. The current version of Rails is 3, which was released last August. Many changes have been made to Rails from version 2 to version 3. I am expecting that the 4th edition will be all updated to version 3, and be awesome as well.

So just be warned, things have changed since this book was published and if you try to follow this book step by step, you will run into issues because of how Rails 3 works now.

This is absolutely one of the best books for an introduction to RoR. I have primarily been a C++ programmer for a while who is generally suspicious of many and most things related to web development. About six months back I decided to broaden my horizons a little bit and started reading this book.

I was pleasantly surprised by the book organization which illustrated very well the concepts of Convention over Configuration(CoC) so inherent to rails. It provided a fast introduction to Ruby programming language and in no time I had a near professional demo web application working for me.

Reading this book has been an interesting experience. Something I hope will be useful in my professional life. Keep up the good work !!

This is the first book you should follow if you plan to get into Rails development. I know many people who have tried to learn Rails. Many that were successful began by running through the tutorial in this book, many that we're unsuccessful or didn't get it, didn't follow this book. Don't just read it, do the work, run the code and build the sample application.

Then, as you are building your own application, the additional depth provided by the reference chapters at the back are excellent. They are the must/read reference section of the book. Combining this with The Pickaxe and you are on your way to becoming a good Rails developer. At which point, please contact me so that I can offer you a job.


The only downside to owning this book is that Rails moves quickly, and covering 2.2 leaves out many 2.3 features. As a mitigation, Sam Ruby has a test suite for the code in the book that ensures it all runs with the latest version of rails, or at least the failures are noted and demarcated. One should consider purchasing the digital version of this book from [...] where you can get the PDF bundled or separately, as it is updated from time to time.

I had almost zero background in Web Applications (I work in embedded systems programming). Few days back I gave a shot to understanding the .Net framework, however it was just too much coding for a starter like me. Someone told me about Ruby on Rails, and I thought to give it a shot. This was the first book that I came across. However it was a total disappointment.

It seemed to me that the author was more interested in getting a website running as soon as possible. Even so that the most crucial explanations were not explained properly. Though i could follow the instructions easily, the explanation of the MVC architecture was not good.

Simply Rails 2, on the other hand proved to be a much better bet for a beginner like me. The concepts are very well explained. The example website is also a little more advanced (clone of digg.com) which helps a lot in understanding more complex applications.

I bought this together with "The Ruby Programming Language" (Flanagan and Matsumoto). They're not the solve-all, best-of-all-solutions by which a Ruby neophyte can jump to the top of the ladder... but they're about as good as we're going to find. An indispensable initial pair of books, which for my own purposes (with a 30-year background in C, C++, C#, Delphi, and dozens of other tools), got me off the ground and headed in the more advanced directions I needed to go to develop what is an extremely sophisticated first Ruby implementation. I could probably write a better book myself now, but sorry... lacking that, this is where you need to start.