Customer Reviews

Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book is build out of about 50, thorough researched, real world enterprise recipes.

While scenarios are easy to comprehend, they go far beyond the "hello world" and show real world challenges, a developer is facing in a legacy software landscape:
* processing (huge) XML files
* handling other data formats like CVS and JSON
* authenticating via LDAP
* bulk loading data into a relational database - with or without validation
* SOAP
* JMS and other message brokers
* RMI

There is also other shiny legacy-free world, where you build a new, at first glance, a stand alone application. But reality is, even for this you need a lot of integration:
* payments with paypal, credit cards
* generating secure but easy to remember passwords
* integrate with C or C++ libraries

Important topic is maintenance of your application and writing applications, that are easy to maintain. Recipes include:
* testing and user stories
* getting documentation for free
* creating daemons
* monitoring with monit
* using own generators

While you will need to play around with mentioned libraries, read rdoc and sometimes probably dive into the source code of the libraries, the recipes in this book will give you a head start. In 15 minutes you will get a feeling for particular solution approach and learn to deal with the most problems expecting you.

In my opinion it is great value for money.

Over 50 'recipes' shows hot to blend existing legacy code using Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and how to create new applications based on existing models. Learn how to process a range of data pieces in all kinds of formats from XML to fixed-length records using a guide that even helps reuse existing C, C++, Java and other codes. A versatile, top pick for any computer library.

After reading this book I've got the impression, that Ruby on Rails doesn't really match the needs of a large enterprise infrastructure. I really love Rails for web applications and its ease of use is also very nice when developing a prototype in an enterprise. For such use-cases this book provides just the right examples.

But when you think of long-time maintenance, modularization, high-availability, or processing large amounts of data, this book can't help you.