11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great for getting started!, August 30, 2007
This review is from: Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)
Not being a trained developer I am surely not the only one that got a little intimidated by
Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)
This is a great book for beginners like me. You'll get a complete introduction to the Rails framework. If you already develop in Rails, look elsewhere but if you have heard the hype and want to see what all the fuss is about, take the plunge, this book will get you up to speed in no time.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very clear introduction to Rails, November 25, 2007
This review is from: Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)
Highly recommended. The heart of the book, discussions in Chapters 4-6, on Active Record, Action View and controllers, are structured and clear. The authors have carefully prioritized the info that a beginning rails developer would need to know thoroughly, and presented it in short, to-the-point paragraphs, along with graphics (screen shots, mini-UML's for the active Record chapters, etc.) that reinforce the points well. Tables that give most common options for the feature being discussed are helpful, also.
I believe that the most difficult thing for a newbie is following the flow of logic in a MVC framework, from the web form that creates/finds a model object's params, to processing params in the controller and Active Record, including validations, showing errors and letting users correct them, CRUD processes in the DBMS and all the routing, renders and redirects that show users what's happening. The authors take each subtopic of Active Record, views and controllers, give an short, intuitive summary of why it's important, then give the most common use scenarios, along with common traps or misunderstandings that might arise.
Chapter 7, Ajax, tackles a large subject in a very condensed manner(they say as much on p. 228). While the overview is good, it's more like a 30,000 foot view that doesn't quite give you enough confidence to start coding in Prototype and scriptaculous. For that, there's the excellent "Ajax on Rails" Raymond book, as well as a couple others in the pipeline.
The rest of the covers testing, sending emails and deployment in, again, a condensed manner. Rails is a fast-moving target, there's a lot of topics that could have been covered here: rspec, test/spec, mocks and stubs, plugins to make fixtures usable, or avoid using fixtures, etc. But it's a great smallish intro to Rails. The appendix intro to Ruby is superfluous. If you already know python, perl or PHP, it might be all you need to get started coding ruby. Otherwise, you'll probably need a more complete intro and reference (Black's "ruby for Rails" is highly recommended).
So this is a topic-structured tutorial for Rails, in contrast to Apress' social networking and e-commerce books, which are project-based and present more code with less explanation (and covered more plugins like Ferret, acts_as_taggable, etc) If you ahve the luxury of borrowing a few different intro rails books , i would encourage it. One or the other method of presenting Rails may work better for you. But you can't go wrong with this book.
The typesetting is clear: code is readable, Tips and Notes are clearly demarcated. The one thing is tat some of the blurbs printed on gray backgrounds are a bit difficult to read
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Too Many Errors, December 27, 2007
This review is from: Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)
I have zero experience in any web development. I'm on page 161 and I'm completely frustrated by the number of errors in this book. When you write for beginners, the code has to be perfect. I can tolerate typos in the text, but when the code doesn't compile, it's serious. You see, I can't spot obvious errors in the code. That's why I bought a book with 'Beginning' in the title.
What pushed me over the edge to write a bad review for this book is the code on page 160. It's listed on the book's errata page - which also contains at least one error. Through trial and error I figured out the correct syntax. There is nowhere on the book's site to contact anyone about fixing the errata page. There's no contact information that I could find on either author's blog.
If you are truly a beginner, as I am, you have to pass on this book. Maybe when they revise for RoR2.0 they'll fix the errors.
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