Customer Reviews

Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy

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

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I had trouble with webpage errors in the examples in the book. So I went to website and downloaded the "code that goes with the book'. Guess what? It had the same errors as the code in the book. So until they can deliver working code, I would skip this book for now, unless you just like debugging code.

I really enjoyed this book.

The code was great. The example application works well and the writing is short yet concise. I really don't have much to say, except that this book was an excellent introduction to learning Rails.

I couldn't give it five stars, however, because the book's web page didn't have an errata. Yes, the code was extremely clean, but Friends of Ed should have included that anyway.

I saw this book in the store the other morning and picked it up, paged through the chapters, then took it straight to the register. It's probably the best beginners book for rails and tackles the most common things you would do with a website (CRUD, userauth, uploads, etc). The author wrote this for people who might have played around with other scripting languages and know some html but are intimidated by a 400 page O'Reilly book. Those books are great, but not so much for beginners. The book is reassuring and shows off the power of rails really well. You could literally pick it up Friday night, start going through everything and finish it Sunday night and have a pretty good idea of how to make rails apps and start extending them. I hope the author follows up with another book that builds off of this one because it is truly the best rails beginner books I've come across.

A few months back I reviewed this book and gave it a 5 star rating. I am now giving it a 3 star rating for the following reasons:

- It has become a bit outdated: Several of the rail idioms used in the book are today legacy and make progress a bit cumbersome for a beginner.

- The book has no test coverage except for a bit towards the end: Although the book builds up a nice functional application, testing is extremely important and is overlooked. Patrick Lenz's book does a good beginner job to understand the importance of testing.

- Some of the code samples are busted i.e. chapter 9 gives an error in a controller. You check the source and there is gibberish in the file.

The book however still has some value.

This is one of the better beginner Rails books on the market. The real-world project that progresses from chapter to chapter is excellent. At the end of the book you feel good about what you've accomplished. A warning though: on the front cover of the book, it says 'no programming experiece required'. This would be a really difficult book for someone with no programming experience.

Another really nice point about this book is the correctness of the XHTML and CSS used. It teaches Rails from a design perspective and is unique in this regard.

Overall a good book for the Rails beginner.

I haven't finished the book yet, but I'm really impressed so far. Please keep in mind that it's not a perfect or comprehensive book, but it serves its purpose very well. Many programming books suffer from wanting to cover everything comprehensively. This is a little tiresome when you just want to get going. The reason I like Rails Solutions so much is that even if you don't understand all (or even most) of the code that you're typing in, your program rapidly progresses - and you'll pick up the syntax and structure over time. It's like learning a foreign language - who wants to be going through all the variants of conjugations when it's a lot faster to just dive right in and start speaking. You'll make lots of mistakes, but you'll get to where you want to be a lot faster.

I fully expect that I'll reference other Ruby and Rails books to supplement this book - but as a way to give myself a nice frame in terms of (very broadly) how Ruby on Rails works (and to get excited about its possibilities) - this is an excellent book.

To call Justin's book "useless" (as some joker before me has) is silly and does a disservice to Rails Solutions. I got a ton of very good, very practical info out of the book, some of which -- such as the Capistrano and deployment stuff -- I'd never come across in such a lucid manner. Is it a beginner's book? Yeah, it is, and it's aimed squarely at designers and front-end developers who are generally uncomfortable w/ dynamic stuff and code, and in that respect it totally suceeds. Cross this book with the classic Agile one and throw in an O'Reilly book or two (Bruce Tate's slim one, maybe, or Ajax on Rails) and you'll be golden.