Ruby on Rails: Up and Running [Paperback]

Bruce Tate (Author), Curt Hibbs (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0596101325 | ISBN-13: 978-0596101329 | Publication Date: August 1, 2006 | Edition: 1

Ruby on Rails is the super-productive new way to develop full-featured web applications. With Ruby on Rails, powerful web applications that once took weeks or months to develop can now be produced in a matter of days. If it sounds too good to be true, it isn't.

If you're like a lot of web developers, you've probably considered kicking the tires on Rails - the framework of choice for the new generation of Web 2.0 developers. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running takes you out for a test drive and shows you just how fast Ruby on Rails can go.

This compact guide teaches you the basics of installing and using both the Ruby scripting language and the Rails framework for the quick development of web applications. Ruby on Rails: Up and Running covers just about everything you need - from making a simple database-backed application to adding elaborate Ajaxian features and all the juicy bits in between. While Rails is praised for its simplicity and speed of development, there are still a few steps to master on the way. More advanced material helps you map data to an imperfect table, traverse complex relationships, and build custom finders. A section on working with Ajax and REST shows you how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic user-centric web pages. The book also explains the essentials of logging to find performance problems and delves into other performance-optimizing techniques.

As new web development frameworks go, Ruby on Rails is the talk of the town. And Ruby on Rails: Up and Running can make sure you're in on the discussion.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bruce A. Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, and father of two. In his spare time, he is an independent consultant in Austin, Texas. In 2001, he founded J2Life, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in Java persistence frameworks and lightweight development methods. His customers have included FedEx, Great West Life, TheServerSide, and BEA. He speaks at conferences and Java user's groups around the nation. Before striking out on his own, Bruce spent 13 years at IBM working on database technologies, object-oriented infrastructure, and Java. He was recruited away from IBM to help start the client services practice in an Austin startup called Pervado Systems. He later served a brief stint as CTO of IronGrid, which built nimble Java performance tools. Bruce is the author of five books, including the bestselling "Better, Faster, Lighter Java", "Beyond Java", and "Spring: A Developer's Notebook", all from O'Reilly.

Curt Hibbs is a senior software developer in St. Louis with more than 30 years' experience in platforms, languages, and technologies too numerous to list. With a keen (and always searching) eye for new methods and technologies to make his work easier and more productive, he has become very active in the Ruby development community.

Read his weblog at blog.curthibbs.us.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (August 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596101325
• ISBN-13: 978-0596101329
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #953,485 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Helpful and informative, also breathless and rushed, September 10, 2006

By 

Michael Ernest "JavaRanch Sheriff" (Corte Madera, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ruby on Rails: Up and Running (Paperback)

This is indeed a fast-paced book designed for experienced developers. Using it, I was able to build the Photo Share project it covers rather quickly. I got a good overview of how Rails works, too.

But while I appreciate the end result, I wasn't always so sure what I did or why I did it. The introduction of concepts is *so* fast and terse that I found it hard to connect concepts to practice. The section on Rails Strengths, on pp. 2-3, could certainly have been stronger on this point. Still, the points the authors wanted to make about the power of the Rails environment was unmistakable.

I disagree with the premise of the book about its intended audience. Web-oriented programmers are certainly ideal for this book; other programmers are going to struggle. A great deal of conceptual background is taken for granted. Because Rails make so many understood connections between components, it's worth a few more pictures and diagrams to illustrate those relationships. The many diagrams on data table structure were not as helpful to me.

There are errata that can be quite annoying if you are following along carefully. Mis-stated filenames crop up now and then. In a few cases I followed the book exactly and lost a bit of functionality. The book does not advise on error paths or what to do when something goes wrong, so if you're not making file backups or otherwise tracking your changes, you'll go down a rat-hole or two.

On the whole, the book has a feel of being a bit rushed and breathless, rather than merely short in form. This means going over the material several times. Often I found a key piece of information buried in a paragraph when a bullet point would have made it easier to spot. I know people are bullet-shy these days, but when you're writing real information as opposed to concepts, listing it out is helpful.

My review copy came free, so I can't complain about price. That said, I wouldn't buy this book at the price it wants.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but short, August 31, 2006

By 

Bruce Jones "xtrmtrk" (Bellevue, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ruby on Rails: Up and Running (Paperback)

Given that this book is only 127 pages long without the Appendix, it's a pretty pricey little item. I liked the content of the book, and certainly learned a lot about how to bring up a Rails application, but a $29.99 retail price seems exorbitant.

In this first edition there are also plenty of typos and some errors in the example code (VERY frustrating). Luckily the corrected source code can be downloaded from O'Reilly free.

I would have given this item 4 or 5 stars if it would have been half the price. Alternatively, this little book would make a great introduction to a more comprehensive book on Rails. Stand-alone, it feels like a rip-off.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars They didn't subtitle it "Lightning-Fast Web Development" by mistake, October 10, 2006

By 

Scott Davis - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ruby on Rails: Up and Running (Paperback)

I love books like this -- get in, get out, get on with it. I'm incredibly busy these days. (Who isn't?) Gone are the days where I can afford to hunker down with a 1,000 page tome, and quite frankly I just don't want to anymore. I place real value in brevity in computer books. This isn't Shakespeare. This is business. Let's get on with it.

Maybe I'm biased; Ruby on Rails: Up and Running takes the same approach that my co-author and I took with JBoss At Work. Rather than a series of disjointed "Hello World" examples, Up and Running starts with a simple application and builds it iteratively through the end of the book. Seeing the application in action, coming to life one chapter at a time, is both rewarding and educational. My copy is dog-eared from repeating the same steps, in order, for the next several applications that I got "up and running" on my own.

If you're looking for an exhaustive reference guide, this isn't the right book. (Agile Web Development with Rails, by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson might be a better fit.) Up and Running is more like an afternoon pair-programming session with a couple of really sharp guys. The back cover copy says it all: "...a quick, no-nonsense introduction that shows you how to build real applications."