Customer Reviews

Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice)

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

 

 

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.

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

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.

I'm a web designer, mostly doing XHTML and CSS. Often I need to work with dynamic applications, so I'm familiar with things like ASP and PHP. I wanted a book to bring me up to speed on Rails since some of the work I've been getting lately has been Rails applications.

This book is good for someone like me who has knowledge of web app design, but an absolute beginner might be stumped by a few bugs. But, if you already have some knowledge in server-side development, this would be a good book to pick up.

'Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional' is a great book for all developers of all levels to learn Rails and get going in no time! With 350+ pages of material covering a whole myriad of different topics from different operating systems to using MySQL to using AJAX to make your web 2.0 app work seamlessly with maximum user friendliness, this is the perfect book for doing just that!!

If you want to get up and running with Rails and need a book to do just that, pick up this great effort from Apress and you will be on the crazy train (horrible attempt at a Rails joke) to building web apps that will be fast and fantastic!!

***** RECOMMENDED

I've got no programming experience and was a bit afraid of getting over my head, but this book has broken the process down nicely so far.

My only complaint is that the information is outdated. This isn't the fault of the book, it's simply a result of its being several years old now. I can't wait for the next version to come out.

I just finished going through the book and I agree with other reviewers that the editing of this book is horrible... The best way to deal with it is to ensure you review the books errata site ([...]) and mark the pages they show as having errors, Glitches, & typos. Doing this to begin with will save you a couple hours of problem solving.

If you're a newbie to programming i wouldn't recommend this book because:
- # of editing errors will frustrate you and possibly leave you with a negative impression of programing
- because of the breadth of topics covered they aren't able to dive into particular areas to teach core topics

I suggest the book if you want an intro to rails and you don't mind working with an older version of rails (book covers 1.2.3 and the current version is 2.x) and dealing with horrible editing.

Apress you should be embarrassed with the editing you provided for this book. Jeff, Cloves & Hampton - great job covering a very broad scope in less than 350 pages.

This book is a hodgepodge of good and bad.

The author is knowledgeable, but the examples bounce around all over the place. That was really frustrating. There are several errors in the code examples, but the book online errata has most of them covered.

But, it's rather dry. Rails is fun to develop with, but I'm sorry to say you won't necessary get that from this book. I would probably recommend Rails Solutions by Justin Williams as a great beginner book (although it doesn't have an errata page on the book's web site).

I was never satisfied with "Agile Web Development with Rails", which was the first Rails book and will forever sell a lot of copies because it was written by DHH. However, its not particularly well organized or well written.

The flow of "Beginning Rails" is much better. Every paragraph is more succinct. I consider myself a Rails expert, so much of the content I was already familiar with, but I nonetheless learned a few things (such as how to receive mail in Rails, not just send). Its useful.

I run a Rails development team and will furnish all our new engineers with a copy, unless they are already up to speed on the platform. (In which case something like "Programming Ruby" would be best.)

I recently got a copy of Beginning Rails. I was quite interested to check it out and it turned out that I liked it a lot. This isn't my only book on Rails, but this one had a unique approach and some good offerings. While other Rails books have you building applications in 2 chapters, they don't really explain what is going on, you just type the commands listed on the page. This is where Beginning Rails shines. The authors do walk you through building an application about events and planning (something like meetup), but they explain each step with the appropriate level of detail. During the creation of the application you why some things are convention in Rails and what it really takes to implement them. I felt like this book gave me a much clearer understanding of Rails, not just how to write application X, as many screencasts or other materials do.

This book is also not flawless. The book came out July 20, of 2007, so it doesn't have much on Rails 2.0. It does mention a few edge-rails features, (which turned out to be 2.0). Also, this book is certainly not the final authority you will need for all things Rails. It has a very decent introduction and overview to most of the key topics, but if you want/need to be more advanced in the Rails space, you will need other material. The book doesn't really cover web services, or working with LDAP at all, which are both things I find I often need. The book also has an Appendix with a brief into to Ruby. If you have other material on Ruby, you're probably better off, as this is understandably, just a short primer.

The contents of the book are quite good though. The chapters explaining the ActionPack and ActiveRecord are very easy to understand and will certainly strengthen the knowledge of a Rails novice. Overall, I rate the book 4/5 simply because I found a few items to nitpick on. It will be staying on my shelf and I will recommend it to my buddies asking about Rails.