Customer Reviews

Foundation Rails 2

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fantastic book to learn Ruby on Rails. This is the fourth Rails book that I read and it is the only one that has truly clicked with me.

The other books were good, but they threw me right into an application and started showing features left and right. Sure, it's nice to get down to coding, but the features are too often presented in a haphazard way without sufficient explanations. I ended up overwhelmed and "programming by coincidence".

On the other hand, Eldon carefully thought out how to organize the content of his book. His explanations are clear and his examples are excellent for understanding the concepts. The prose keeps the reader engaged, without falling into the trap of distracting the reader with too many jokes, pats on the shoulder and hoorahs.

I highly recommend this book for learning Ruby on Rails. Rails has a tremendous amount of cool features and writing about them is not an easy task. Eldon has met this challenge and produced an excellent result.

Finally, a beginner Rails book which is 1) up-to-date w/ Rails 2.x, 2) illustrated appropriately for a beginner (true of all non-professional level friendofED titles), and most importantly 3) includes an introduction to TDD/BDD. Test-driven or Behavior-driven web development, and more specifically "user stories," can/should be a great way to get past the "blank white screen" that many beginners have trouble overcoming. I've been diligently reading Rails texts for an entire year, and while this probably won't raise any bars for a seasoned coder, it is a much better starting point than anything that was available one year ago.

I am in the process of reading Foundation Rails 2 by Eldon Alameda which is the best book on Rails for beginners I have ever read and I've read quite a few. Mr. Alameda has a unique way of explaining things clearly and in enough detail that it makes sense. If you have ever wanted to dive into Rails and but weren't sure where to start, get this book.

Foundation Rails 2 is simply the best book for learning Ruby on Rails. The author does an amazing job communicating some points, which I could not previously understand by working logically through rails. I read four other ruby books, most of them half way through until I got overwhelmed and lost. With Foundation, the author really teaches the material in a way that seems personal, real and not overwhelming. Finally I have a well rounded knowledge of Ruby on Rails. The one thing I would suggest is purchasing at book on Ruby, because like most Rails books, there is only a small section about Ruby (not a bad thing, only so much space).

After taking a few abysmal programming courses in college, I knew to learn anything of value about programming, I'd have to resort to self teaching. After a few days of surfing the tech blogs, I stumbled upon the programming language Ruby and an introductory book named Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. My thirst for anything Ruby was ignited. In addition, there was an excellent, popular web frame work that used Ruby, Ruby on Rails.

After reading Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, I thought I should go pick up a beginners book on Rails. While cruising the bookshelves at the local big chain bookstore, I was baffled at the lack of a decent spring board into Rails. I looked at Sitepoint's and Head First's offerings. Utter crap. It baffles me why anyone would purchase either of those books. The 'better grab a slice of pizza because this next example is going to be tough' asides we're rather annoying and the rush to build a web application seemed useless. I refused to be a copy cat for 400+ pages. Then I stumbled upon Alameda's Foundation Rails 2. Finally, a book actually worth reading. It had thorough examples and explanations of how the Rails Framework worked, in addition to being directed toward a programmer novice like myself. I walked out of the bookstore one happy camper.

After a few weeks of reading and experimenting with his examples in Foundation Rails 2. (Alameda's examples actually made me chuckle to myself multiple times throughout the book. Hilarious pop-culture references.) I can now say that this is the most worthwhile and beneficial purchase towards my education I've made in the past 4 years, other than a decent computer. Highly recommended to anyone that doesn't know where to start learning Rails. I hope he continues authoring books for years to come.

- cantbecool

Background: I have been learning and using Rails on Ubuntu for 2 years, and have purchased/read > 5 books on Ruby and Rails - and spent endless hours looking for online tips and info.
Results: I am VERY happy with the book, and I've actually learned many new capabilities of Rails that I just never found out about. I wished I had this book a year ago. For things I thought I knew, this book explained why/how they work. Some examples I can think of are: use of reload! while using ./script/console to reload db, Named scope (what a great feature to know), Dirty Objects (excellent for easy/clean data processing code), and most helpful - I learned about Passenger for deployment and it worked just as described in book - amazing! (BTW: Like most people, I've been pulling my hair out trying to get a decent deployment to work correctly). Last but not least, the writing by the author is kind of casual and fun to read. Many thanks to Eldon Alameda for writing this book.

Though certainly not all, I do like many of the Friends of Ed books. This book falls under that category. It is well written and organized.

If you're going to read any Rails book, you'll get more out of it if you either concurrently learn Ruby, or learn Ruby first. That being said, the author does a good job of explaining things to help bring you on board with how to develop in Rails.

The book is definitely worth owning, and though I've been using Rails for going on 2 years now, I picked up things from this book that made it worth the purchase to me.

This book will give you a great start in writing your first rails app. Book is clear and easy to follow. Example code is easy to understand and relevant to many applications. I have been programming in PHP for years, this book has made the transition to rails very simple.

I liked how the author made it very simple for beginners to get into Rails. The problem I find about it is the comparison of Ruby on Rails, a framework, to PHP, a language. Don't get me wrong, I like Ruby better than PHP but I'd like to put things fair. Don't compare a language to a framework.

Like the title says, it is really a good beginner's book.

I've read this book two or three times now and it's been very helpful. I was frustrated with another popular Rails book I ordered because the code was outdated and I didn't have enough knowledge at the time to make the examples work. The entire Rails universe is in the early stages of the Big Bang (!), which means lots of changes. Alameda is careful to provide links to gem versions that will work with his sample code. While I found a few typos, they were all minor and I had very few problems running every example. His sample "lost toys" application is a good teaching tool and I've already used some of the things I learned from it in a commercial application.