Customer Reviews

Practical Rails Plugins (Expert's Voice in Web Development)

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I'm very surprised this book hasn't been reviewed, and while I've used it more as a reference - meaning that I didn't read it linearly - it is at once a book that I use more frequently than the others. If I'm mocking up an idea, or just trying to get something done, usually I'll either grab this book off the shelf and see if there is a quick solution, or fall back to one of the Rails Recipe books from Pragmatic Programmers. Rails plug-ins come, and Rails plug-ins go, but in peeking real quick, most all of the presented plug-ins are still good choices right now (January '09) ...

Unfortunately, a lot of the plugins featured in this book are out of date, especially with the impending release of Rails 3.1. Others have been repackaged as gems, so they're viable but for many plugins more modern, feature-rich alternatives have come around. Still, I do use the book for the ins and outs of some of the plugins that are still around, like ActiveMerchant. For that, it's been a good reference. We need more books like this one, because a lot of plugins/gems are simply not documented well enough.