8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cohesive introduction to Ruby on Rails, February 18, 2007
This review is from: Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy (Paperback)
Rails Solutions by Justin Williams was an excellent primer to the popular framework, Ruby on Rails. I recently had a chance to learn some basics of the RoR framework from a friend of mine, Stephen Rainey. He got me up and running and pointed me to some great resources and books. This book is a recent release from Friends of Ed and it is highly recommended if you are just getting your feet wet with Rails. The book walks you through each step to get up and running and developing the `Railslist' application. The author takes the time to walk through the installation process for both OS X and Windows. The flow of the book was very easy to read and each chapter built more from the previous chapters. The goal of the book was to create a working rails application, while showing you the possible routes and benefits. The overall flow looked a bit like this:
The first chapters were very elementary. This is a good thing for those looking to learn the right way to get started. The author walks you through Ruby, the language behind Rails, and shows you some of the constructs and nuances of the language. This is a good primer for those coming from another language (such as PHP) that looks very different. After the introduction to the language, he moved forward into the setup.
Installing Rails was painless. The author walks through the necessary steps to setup a development environment on the Mac and Windows platform. For those who are interested in some additional resources on setting up your environment, check out the updated Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X by Dan Benjamin. Personally, I have found using Mac Ports a very easy way to manage your development environment and it is worth a good look.
We are now ready to build our application! Through the next few chapters, the author walks you through creating a `railslist' application. With each chapter you learn new aspects of rails. You learn how to setup your project, how to use scaffolding, how to generate your models, views, and controllers, and how to get your database connected and working. He goes in depth on each aspect. Setting up relationships and validations in your model (ActiveRecord), setting up your Controllers and using custom routing, and then how to get your views in place and use partials and .rjs files. Towards the end, we even get to add a dash of Ajax to the application for some simple tasks.
The last chapters and appendices discuss deployment of your application to a production server and all the pieces that need to be in place to go live to the public and handle the traffic. Though this book covered the steps, I have heard that there is more to be said on deploying your application - so you may want to look at some more resources.
This book is for a beginner to Rails. If you are an advanced programmer or have been in Rails for a while now - then this book is not for you (and the author states this in the first paragraph of the book). I felt that there were some pieces that could have been discussed related to progressive enhancement and accessibility (AJAX and CSS), especially when building the AJAX into the application. However, that is no reason to not give this book a chance.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pro's won't need it, and Novices won't be able to connect the dots, July 31, 2008
This review is from: Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy (Paperback)
I can only warn you not to use this book to start learning Ruby on Rails! First of all, you'll have a lot of trouble using the examples with Ruby on Rails 2.0 or higher, unless they've come out with an updated edition of this book. Ruby on Rails 2.0 has some significant changes incorporated from its predecessors that will not work with the examples in this book.
This book walks you through an example that creates basically a simple web application similar to craigslist, but it leaves a lot of relevant information unaddressed. I used to develop pretty good solutions in C and C++ about 10 years ago and now I thought I could use this experience to get into Ruby on Rails fairly easy, but this book just didn't do it for me. It doesn't provide enough background information tying everything together and connecting the dots. And just walking somebody through a list of examples simply doesn't do it. There's more to teaching then documenting a few code examples!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Why can't technical books be edited before publication?, November 4, 2008
This review is from: Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy (Paperback)
Three stars = five stars for the author and 0 stars for the editor.
This would be a fine introduction to Rails: not too much, not too little, just enough to get you up and running with a nice toy application. However, the sample code simply will not run as presented in the book. This is bad for a book that is essentially a single project.
Some of the problems are inevitable. Method names got changed in later versions of Ruby. This is not the fault of the author. But along with the little annoying mistakes in sample code, there are some real boners -- for instance, chapter tabs that read 1, 2, 3, 6, ...
Did anyone look at the galley proofs?
On the other hand, although working through the errors is frustrating, it can be instructive. You will get familiar with http://api.rubyonrails.org/ and the forums a little sooner than you would expect with a beginner book.
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