Customer Reviews

Ruby on Rails Beyond the Basics

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First off, I love video tutorials. Watching what the author walk through it with you is a great learning tool, better then just reading code in a book. You see his reactions first-hand and get some assurance that what you're seeing is in fact what the author too is seeing.

This title starts with a hands-on guide to basic RoR as a sort of warm-up/review for you, and then walks through creating a "Simple Blog" as he puts it - which is fairly comprehensive in terms of site functionality. There is a public area with all the typical blog operations, as well as a private area for authors to log in and manage posts.

The only problem is, that instead of walking you through a "best practices" approach to creating a site - he often purposefully makes errors that you are forced to fix later. For instance, he'll walk you through setting up specific migrations for your database, then say "but what if we felt like renaming this table in the middle of all our work?", and waste your time walking you through this hypothetical situation. And later on, he says "You'll see now why we should have set things up right at the beginning", as you have to do a find/replace within your code and rename/move files from one folder to another to deal with a naming error early on.

Maybe you will like learning in this way, but I got so frustrated wasting time fixing problems that he deliberately put in there. When I'm learning a new language, I want to be shown the absolute best way to set up a new site from start to finish, telling you what problems to avoid is fine - but not wasting hours doing things that turn out to be wrong, only to waste more time fixing it. I stopped 75% through the project and don't plan on finishing, I'll look for another RoR book.