The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) (Paperback)

by Obie Fernandez (Author)
Key Phrases: mongrel cluster, testing views, application console, All About Helpers, Courtenay Says, Extending Rails (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications

 

Ruby on Rails strips complexity from the development process, enabling professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value. Now, for the first time, there’s a comprehensive, authoritative guide to building production-quality software with Rails. Pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez and a team of experts illuminate the entire Rails API, along with the Ruby idioms, design approaches, libraries, and plug-ins that make Rails so valuable. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails’ tools and best practices to maximize productivity and build polished applications users will enjoy.

 

Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails’ key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does– and how to make it behave the way you want it to.

 

This book will help you

Increase your productivity as a web developer

Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails

Learn what’s new in Rails 2.0

Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec

Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers

Leverage Rails’ support for designing REST-compliant APIs

Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques

Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing

Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping

Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications

Incorporate logins and authentication into your application

Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own

Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer

Choose the right Rails production configurations

Streamline deployment with Capistrano

 

 

About the Author

Obie Fernandez is a recognized tech industry leader and independent consultant. He has been hacking computers since he got his first Commodore VIC-20 in the eighties, and found himself in the right place and time as a programmer on some of the first Java enterprise projects of the mid-nineties. He moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1998 and gained prominence as lead architect of local startup success MediaOcean. He also founded the Extreme Programming (later Agile Atlanta) User Group and was that group’s president and organizer for several years. In 2004, he made the move back into the enterprise, tackling high-risk, progressive projects for world-renowned consultancy ThoughtWorks. He has been evangelizing Ruby and Rails online via blog posts and publications since early 2005, and earned himself quite a bit of notoriety (and trash talking) from his old friends in the Java open-source community. Since then, he has presented on a regular basis at numerous industry events and user group meetings, and even does the occasional training gig for corporations and groups wanting to get into Rails development. Nowadays, Obie specializes in the development and marketing of large-scale, web-based applications. 

 

Product Details

• Paperback: 912 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (November 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321445619
• ISBN-13: 978-0321445612
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.2 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #65,429 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars must-have reference for rails devs. , December 7, 2007

By	pounding on the keyboard "wantaknow" (Bay area CA USA) - See all my reviews

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This and "The Ruby Way": Always-On-Your-Desk Books, January 6, 2008

By	Larry (Somerville, MA) - See all my reviews

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-have reference for any Rails developer, December 12, 2007

By	Michael Slater (Sebastopol, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.