Customer Reviews

Simply Rails 2.0

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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)

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.

This book is a great start, but you won't be able to write applications in Ruby on Rails by the end of it.

Let me refine that: you will be able to write one Ruby on Rails application by the end of it. The book walks you through creating a program that works like Digg. The book explains well everything that you need to do to write this one program, and introduces you to the basics of RoR architecture and how RoR works. I followed the instructions and understood everything that was going on.

However, once you have finished this book and written your Digg-like program, there is no guidance for where to go next. There isn't a chapter on "Further Resources" or "Where to go from here" or anything at all - you're just stuck with your little Digg-imitation. Not only that, but the book tends to introduce information in a rather haphazard order. From a pedagogy standpoint, the order in which information is presented makes a lot of sense. But it makes the book useless as a reference manual, or even as a model for how to do your own project.

It's fine as a first step and as an introduction to Ruby on Rails, especially since at the moment it's the only thing in print about Rails 2.x. But you will have to read other books before you can be a competent RoR programmer.

This is my 3rd book on Ruby/Rails. It will get you up and running quickly. It is not like a "Ruby/Rails Bible" though. References are difficult to find when you are against a time line.

As with so much information on Ruby/Rails, this book lacks depth of issues that occur in real world web programming.

It is by far the best start up book I have found.

I started out buying Agile web Dev with Rails http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-Third/dp/1934356166/ and wasn't learning much.

This book helps you get the big picture. He explains in detail how to do things, then shows you how its done. He wants you to see the big picture before you do anything. He even shows you errors you may get and how to fix them. There's an awesome intro to Ruby and to the Unix Terminal that was very helpful. I understood everything before I built it (as opposed to building it and briefly explaining what's going on).

Patrick gives a terrific intro to Ruby and RoR through the book-long creation of a sample application from scratch to something pretty impressive. While I'm far from a Ruby or Rails expert, with the background and experience obtained from SR2, I'm able to easily fly through 'the' reference books and find what I need (The Rails Way, The Ruby Way).

What I didn't expect to find and did!

- Introduction to Ruby
- Introduction to OOP
- Such a strong focus on testing (though not TDD, hence the 4 stars)
- A full chapter on debugging and performance analysis! (yes!!)

Here's why you need to buy this book:

- Consolidated Rails 2 information, one of the only of its kind that gets consistently good reviews.
- Pauses in the ride to introduce important concepts like REST, rather than just telling you to do something without giving you the background to understand why Rails 2 is focused on resources.
- Conversational writing style; easy to read and understand. Unlike the book on Flash I have, you won't have to read things twice or wonder what the heck you're supposed to be doing with an example.

Overall, I'm very happy with this purchase and have recommended it to anyone I know interested in RoR.

I have to concur with the previous reviews on this site. I'd been searching for months for a good Rails 2 book, and, at last, I have found one. It doesn't start with a massive, unwieldly tutorial, one that throws everything at you at once ("look: scaffolding! look: helpers! look: I'm horribly lost! :-) but actually takes the time to coherently explain the underlying structure, and builds on that explanation step-by-step.

The diagrams are great -- if anything, the book could use more, e.g., showing the tie between controller actions and views.

If I were to teach a course in Rails -- and I very well might -- this would be my hands-down choice.

If you need to learn Rails, Simply Rails 2 is simply the best out there.

I am new to programming. I did a lot of it back 20 years ago, but am new to object oriented programming and just starting to learn programming again. I am about 1/2 way thru the book and have found myself now reading other books (Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper is one) to try and fill in the blanks. The book takes the approach of developing a web application from the git go. I like this approach, but it glosses over WHY we are doing it. I found myself wondering why, more than saying "oh yeah, that makes sense". Maybe the fact that I am new to this wonderful programming world has a lot to do with it, but the book calls itself the "the ultimate programmers guide" so I guess I expected more from it. Overall it is an OK book, but the Agile book by Dave Thompson seems to do a better job of walking thru developing a web app.

I am new to Ruby and of course Rails. I found Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) book very useful to learn Ruby. Unfortunately I had difficulty finding a simple and clear book on Rails, till I found Simply Rails 2. Rails uses convention over configuration and could be quite confusing and a bit mysterious for someone coming from traditional .NET or Java backgrounds. Patrick Lenz does an amazing job demystifying Rails and even making it a pleasure to learn. The clarity of this book resulted in several aha moments and insights for me. By the time you finish the book, you will know how to create a useful REST based resources oriented test driven web application.

I found downloading the code from companion website and working through the step by step Rails 2 Digg like sample application very useful. If you are new to Rails and like step by step books, this one is definitely for you.