Practical Rails Social Networking Sites (Expert's Voice) [Paperback]

Alan Bradburne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 2007 | ISBN-10: 1590598415 | ISBN-13: 978-1590598412 | Edition: 1

This book ties together the popular framework Ruby on Rails with another hot concept - social networking websites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Social networking is a kingpin of the Web 2.0 revolution sweeping the Internet right now. Due to its versatility, using Ruby on Rails to build and maintain social networking sites is the perfect partnership.

This book will be one of the few project-based guides to Ruby on Rails - perfect for programmers that prefer the hands-on method of learning by example.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Alan Bradburne is the co-founder of Incrediblinc Ltd (www.incrediblinc.com), a London-based Ruby on Rails development company specializing in developing community sites for both end-users and enterprise clients.

Alan has over ten years experience in the web and mobile development industries, and has worked for Motorola, Nextel and Sun Microsystems. Prior to founding IncrediblInc he created http://phlog.net, the world's first dedicated mobile photo blogging community. He also developed the social networking site http://cudlz.com.

He lives in Berkshire, England with his wife.

Product Details

• Paperback: 421 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (June 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590598415
• ISBN-13: 978-1590598412
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #945,753 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Bad, July 20, 2007

By 

Lee (CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Practical Rails Social Networking Sites (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)

The is essentially a programming cook book with recipes centered on social networking functionality. That being said - this is not a "getting started on rails" book; you should have some idea of how to use rails (but you dont have to be an expert).

Here are some of the recipes: developing a CMS, blog with RSS, blog with web services, a forum, photo gallery (probably would have been better if this one had used Amazon's S3), adding tag functionality, creating a mobile version of your site, XFN, ...

Unless you're a broke student debating between this and food, I'd get this book. There are decent examples that are useful to see. It's pretty good considering Amazon's cheap price and considering this is the only book out on Rails related to social networking sites (as of when I wrote this review).

Update: I've now read the other Ruby on Rails Social Network Book: RailsSpace. In my opinion I would get both. However if you have to choose one it would depend both on your skill level and taste. Would you rather have more subjects covered with less material, or would you like less subjects being covered more in depth. If you want more subjects covered and you think you can figure out the extra details, then Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is for you.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good, practical introduction, October 24, 2007

By 

James Stewart (Grand Rapids, MI, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Practical Rails Social Networking Sites (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)

Taking readers step-by-step through the creation of the RailsCoders.net website, Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a well paced guide to building web applications that tick many of the boxes of the moment.

The book starts with basics, giving simple instructions for installing Rails on a variety of platforms, and then steps through simple content management, adding users and groups, building a blogging engine, adding a discussion forum and photo gallery, integrating with Google Maps and Flickr, and deployment. Along the way the various aspects of rails' testing framework are introduced as they're used. The style isn't test-driven, and it would have been nice to see that style introduced, but tests are written after each piece of functionality, demonstrating some of their use and importance.

Judicious use is made of plugins with a number of recommendations made throughout the book. restful_authentication is referred to, but its functionality is largely duplicated in the code. That's probably a sensible move so early in the book as it's important that developers understand what the code is doing even if they're going to employ a plugin for the implementation. YM4R/GM is used to implement the Google Maps functionality and it's good to see that getting some attention in print.

Readers who have already built a couple of rails apps may well find themselves skipping large chunks of content as a lot of the code will be familiar. As other reviewers have noted, it is a little curious that "The Apress Roadmap" suggests this as a more advanced title when it would probably work better for an engaged beginner than an experienced developer.

Of course, the great problem with publishing any rails title right now is that version 2.0 is just around the corner, and with its release we'll see the end of built-in pagination and a few changes to the routes. As a consequence there are likely to be a number of readers who find that the examples in the book fail to run on the latest stable rails by the time they come to try them. Hopefully Apress will be able to offer a brief supplement with the book or online to help readers update the code for the new features.

Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a solid introduction illustrating how simple it can be to build useful web applications with Ruby on Rails. I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone with rails experience, but it will be high on my list of recommendations for beginners who are wanting to dive straight in.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Buyer beware, October 20, 2009

By 

V. Campos - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Practical Rails Social Networking Sites (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)

Why pay $30 dollars for a book that makes you do all research in order to make code work? This book needs to be taken out of the shelves, catalog, db, etc. Outdated and waste of time and money. It also seems that the "supposed" companion website has been deserted for a while, and the author hasn't comment or find alternate solution for the raising version issues.