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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hands down leading tutorial book on Rails 2.0, May 29, 2008
This review is from: Simply Rails 2.0 (Paperback)
Amongst the plethora of Rails books, only a few cover 2.0+, and even fewer do a decent job of it. This book covers Rails 2.0.2 incrementally from the ground up, and there's even a decent intro to Ruby for those completely new to the language.
Patrick Lenz thoroughly covers the basics, RESTful routing, plugins, testing, etc., and also teaches several tips, tricks, and shortcuts of the trade...things that you may not easily deduce by reading the API. Practically every concept covered is matched with hands-on exercises while developing the book's application. The code is accurate and virtually errata-free.
There were only a couple of times that I had a question. I emailed Patrick, he responded literally within minutes, and was very helpful!
I have read several Rails books. Yet this is only the second book I've read that truly practices what it preaches about testing (and the other was Patrick's first version for Rails 1.2.x: Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications).
If you want to learn Rails, or already know Rails pre-2.0 and want to get up to speed on the new features and functionality of Rails 2.0+, or finally commit to proper testing, buy this book and take the time to work through and understand every exercise. I think you will be very glad you did.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
very lucid explanation; book has some limitations, August 28, 2008
This review is from: Simply Rails 2.0 (Paperback)
THis is one of hte best beginner web app books i have ever seen (I've read books on rails, PHP , django, Zope, but not too much on .NET, ASP or java). The author takes the approach that he will introduce one coherent topic at a time thoroughly, with as little source code as possible, without digressions, exceptions or comparisons to other languages (perl, PHP, java). This he does admirably.
If i had to comment on the books limitations, i would say that there are a lot of topics that are glossed over: CSS, regular expressions, security. e.g. page 175, "regexs are confusing". I would've said that regex's are important in rails: validations, generating URL slugs, etc, and there are a lot of good resources, and also verbose mode to make them more readable. The book is pretty well indexed but "regular expressions" doesn't appear in index. p 329, you're shown how to take user input and display back in view *without* sanitizing. This is absolutely something you do not want to show in a beginner rails book. There's no mention of XSS, SQL injection, other security issues in the book, as far as i can tell. Something analogous is on p 258, where plain text passwords are stored to database, along with text that says this is not a great practice. The text should say "If you try to put this code into production, you'll probably be fired".
When you finish reading this carefully, you still won't know enough to look up issues in teh Rails Way book, which is where a aspiring Rails developer needs to be to find work. The book doesn't provide the next steps, e.g. never mentions the most often used rails plugins, ImageMagick, acts as solr/ferret, restful_auth, etc, doesn't mention any browser issues or DBMS issues. (Chap 10 covers acts_as_taggable on steroids pretty thoroughly)
But for somebody who's never done web apps, this book would have a much high comprehension rate than most others (the Dummies rails book was good, but now outdated). So for target demographic, highly recommended.
I would also say that the book's ruby overview is kind of inadequate (rails books either do a handholding ruby in 25 pages chapter, or a detailed view of metaprogramming, gotchas and edge/corner cases). I prefer the latter (as in Ediger "advanced Rails" and Rappin "Professional Rails", both superb books)
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Beginner Book, July 10, 2008
This review is from: Simply Rails 2.0 (Paperback)
This book is excellent, if you know nothing of Ruby on Rails, and know very little of other programming languages.
It is a book to introduce you to Rails (and Ruby) without going into too much of the technical aspects.
This will in no way make you proficient at developing Rails applications, however, it introduces you to the fundamentals (especially testing) of rails with which you can go and watch screen screencasts, follow tutorials or read other books on rails with a basic understanding of the process.
I do NOT recommend this book to anyone trying to further along their Rails training (nor is it intended for that).
I DO recommend this for anyone who has picked up a rails book or watched a screencast and blindly started to regurgitate the code that is being taught without understanding what it is supposed to do. This book will explain it.
A (free) tutorial with which I recommend in conjunction with this book is:
[..]
This tutorial goes into gory detail over (nearly) every basic step that you need to know to start your Rails apps.
I have read nearly 10 books , plus countless screencasts and tutorials (mostly outdated due to Rails 2.0) on Rails and Simply Rails 2 is by far the most up-to-date and easy to read for a true beginner.
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