Customer Reviews

The Rails Way

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been waiting for this book since the Sample chapter on activeRecord was released. I suspected this book would answer all the people decrying Rails lack of (java or PHP-like) docs. Well, it is breathtaking in its scope (really), it is the definitive working dev's reference to the APIs, development, testing and deployment best practices and most widely adopted/tested plugins and gems (with a few holes). I believe every dev should go thru the table of contents slowly and carefully (several times).

Obie F seems to have assembled a huge team of resources to collaborate on each chapter, and it shows in exhaustive coverage. The table of contents entry for the testing chapter is 2 1/2 pages long and rspec is separate from that. So when i hit a problem, i think i'll hit this book first, then google rails mailing lists, and the intarweb tubes.

Negatives (cause I'm looking for perfection):
- footnotes are clustered at each chapter's end. Good luck finding a superscript number in a 75-page chapter.

-typesetting needs work. It doesn't clearly convey a hierarchy of topics, subtopics, and sub-subtopics , there's just lot of serif, non-serif, bold, italics and sizes on pages that walk through APIs (ajax, ActiveSupport chapters). Better to use outline-style numbering (e.g. Pragmatics). p. 229: the code example mixes an opening single-quote and backticks. Bad, bad.

- a number of what could be considered core topics are not covered: search/indexing libraries (ferret, solr, sphinx), HAML/SASS, pinging and site stats libs like mint, god, AWStats, etc. Postgres (this is a biggie), they recommend deploying to Mysql and Redhat/Centos/Debian /gentoo without much detail. textmate/vim/emacs/eclipse. source control libs like darcs and git. Rspec *is* given 30 pages, this is big. (There's not room for detailed discussion, but they could have mentioned these things ina sentence somewhere. most of these topics are covered in detail somewhere in blogspace, except for ferret/solr/sphinx deployment strategies, where you have to read mailing list archives.

- rails is on cusp of widespread adoption of release 2. I haven't seen anywhere that AW or Safari online books plans to issue regular PDF or online updates to the book. This is the main criticism if it is correct, relative to how Pragmatic has been releasing its books.

I think the classic "Agile Web Development with Rails" is a better book for learning about Rails. But while this book comes in second in that category (which ain't bad), I think as a reference it comes in first.
One thing I especially like about this book is that he explains *why* certain things are the way they are. Quite a few times I found myself thinking, "So *that's* why it's like that" or "So *that's* why they did it that way". Good stuff.

This is an outstanding book. It's not a good introduction to Rails, which it isn't intended to be, but for someone who knows the basics of Rails this book is both an essential reference and a valuable tutorial on the deeper aspects of Rails. Despite the fact that it is, at its heart, a reference, there's so much insight in the descriptions that it's a great tutorial as well for the intermediate Rails developer.

The Rails community is flourishing, and the technology is evolving quickly. Before too long, Rails 2.3 will be in general release. This book is a solid reference, but its roots are in Rails 1.x, with a couple of scraps tossed in to earn the "Rails 2.0" seal on the cover. As a rails newbie, I got a foundation from this book, but unfortunately, if you try and take this book literally but you are working in rails 2.x, you will get frustrated. There are plenty of resources on the web to help fill this gap. I like having a physical reference, so I'm glad I bought the book, but newbies beware. I would love to see a new edition of this book, thoroughly updated to reflect the current state of rails.

This is a good book that could have been better with a better publisher. I'm very disappointed with Addison Wesley here.

First, the production quality of this book is horrid. If I had picked it up physically in a book store, I would have never bought it. The paper is thick and heavy, yet cheap, like elementary school construction paper. I have books of equal page numbers that are a centimeter thinner. I literally took a razor blade to mine and split it in two so I could carry it around to read it (that's how committed I was to reading it, which says something for the content :-). For anyone interested, splitting it exactly at Chapter 12 works without it falling apart.

The editing was horrid too. Somewhere between the copy editor and the technical reviewers, someone should have caught the repetition. As an author myself, I know how hard it is to review your own work, especially when it comes to wordiness and repetition. So I don't blame the author, but the editing/reviewing process. The editors/reviewers should have also caught some of the continuity problems, starting with the very first chapter. When I started reading the book I had about a year of Rails experience and had read about 3 other Rails books. While I read the first chapter, I was thinking: "Wow... how lost are Rails noobs right now?"

Next, there are 30 pages of fluff at the beginning of the book. Again, not likely a decision of the author, but filler inserted by publishers. By comparison, The Ruby Programming Language (O'Reilly) has 5 pages before the first chapter. There is also over 100 pages of API reference, which were outdated the second the book hit the shelves. Again, I cannot imagine Obie actually suggesting this, and I know how pushy publishers are. Note to Addison Wesley: There's this really neat thing called the internet where we go for up-to-date API references now!

Finally, this is not a Rails 2.0 book. This is where I truly sympathize with any author of a technical book. Writing books takes a damn long time and is very hard. It's often the case that the technology changes by the time the book is finished. But that does not mean that a publisher should LIE on the front cover on the book. Of course, Rails 2.0 is mentioned in the book. But so many things from the migrations to the ActiveRecord discussion were not even Rails 1.2! Some of the soft information and suggestions were still worthwhile, but it still isn't Rails 2.0. So to put a big "Covers Rails 2.0" stamp on the front is borderline dishonest... at most, it "mentions 2.0 sometimes".

This is still a good book and a worthwhile read. Under almost any other publisher it is a 5 star book. The star lost is at the hands of Addison Wesley (I wanted to take two, but Obie doesn't deserve that). I hope a second edition comes out that covers all of these production quality issues, thus putting a better frame around a worthwhile piece of work.

This is a hefty tome. I have just begun to crack it. My colleagues and I, all professional Rails developers, readily agreed that the detail in this book is remarkable. I opened to a random page and found brief discussions of every option to one of Rails's methods.

Note that this book doesn't start at zero, it is definitely a reference work. And that is a most welcome development for the Rails community.

I think this effort deserves to be the new standard Rails book.

Full disclosure: Obie has done some side work for my employer and I am acquainted with him. I do think I'd be saying the same thing if I'd never heard of the author.

Pretty much all the positive aspects of this book have been covered by previous reviewers. As a rails noob with a still a hazy and sketchy understanding of many, many aspects of RoR, this book is exactly what I need. Its great strength is that it gives a detailed account of Rails, great detail in fact running to just over 900 pages. I have found that as I've worked thru other tutorial oriented Rails books, whenever I've been puzzled by some issue, this book has been very useful. Great resource, highly recommended.

I'm fairly new to Rails, and for the past few months I've been working through a lot of "Intro to Rails" books, and others where you build a big project over the course of the book. The materials are all excellent, but they did leave me with a lack of understanding. Often, with Rails, I would do something, like create two models, create associations, etc., and it works for me...but I really didn't have any idea how it was working.

That's where this book helps tremendously. There are not large examples for development, but it tells you what Rails is doing under the hood, how it's doing it, and why. It's a wonderful book for those looking for a deeper understanding.

Of course, it's definitely not for complete beginners. You should already know how to do at least the basics with Rails (particularly the console), and it would help to have a base understanding of Ruby.

Ok, maybe this book it's too long and some of the topics might seem a simple cut-and-paste from the Rails API docs.
Anyway if you already know Rails (aka: you have already read Agile Web development with Rails), this is your gateway to a deeper comprehension of this revolutionary framework.

This is *the* rails book to get. Even if you're an experienced Rails developer, you'll find loads of great information and advice. The real-world examples are really helpful. Includes an excellent tour through the framework itself. This is one of the few Rails books that covers testing well. Obie is obviously a Jedi.