Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) (Paperback)

by Jeffrey Allan Hardy (Author), Cloves Carneiro Jr. (Author), Hampton Catlin (Author)
Key Phrases: active record, tiki party, action controller, Action Mailer, Started Finished, Hampton's Apartment (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Beginning Rails is the practical starting point for anyone wanting to learn how to build dynamic web applications using the Rails framework for Ruby. You’ll learn how all of the components of Rails fit together and how you can leverage them to create sophisticated web applications with less code and more joy.

This book is particularly well suited to those with little or no experience with web application development, or who have some experience but are new to Rails. Beginning Rails assumes basic familiarity with web terms and technologies, but doesn't require you to be an expert.

Topics include:

• A gentle introduction to the Ruby programming language
• Installing Ruby and Rails on a Mac, Linux, or Windows system
• The philosophy behind Rails and why it matters
• The Model-View-Controller architecture
• The basics of relational databases and SQL
• Setting up a MySQL database and creating a schema with migrations
• Experimenting with your live application in the Rails console
• Creating rich relationships between your models
• Using controllers and templates properly
• Leveraging helpers to keep your templates clean and logic free
• Adding Ajax and visual effects to enrich your user interfaces
• JavaScript with Prototype and script.aculo.us
• How to send and receive mail from your application
• Using and creating your own plug-ins
• Ensuring your code against Murphy’s Law through writing tests
• Using Capistrano to deploy your application

Rather than delving into the arcane details of Rails, the focus is on the aspects of the framework that will become your pick, shovel, and axe. Part history lesson, part introduction to object-oriented programming, and part dissertation on open source software, Beginning Rails doesn’t just explain how to do something in Rails, it explains why.

Every programmer fondly remembers the book that helped them get started. The goal of Beginning Rails is to become that book for you, today.

About the Author
Jeffrey Allan Hardy is a web developer, programmer, and occasional speaker with more than seven years of experience building large-scale web applications. He began working with Rails shortly after its first public release in 2004 and hasn't looked back. He is a partner at Unspace Interactive in Toronto, blogs at http:// quotedprintable.com, and lives somewhere in the deep Canadian wilderness with his wife, his dog, and a cat.

Cloves Carneiro Jr. is a software engineer and web application developer with ten years of experience creating enterprise-level web applications for companies in the telecommunication and financial industries, including Cablevision, MTS, and Bell Canada. Born in Brazil and then living for some years in Canada, he now lives in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with his wife, Jane. He owns and runs SpinBits, a Rails consulting and training company, and blogs at http://ccjr.name.

Hampton Catlin was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1982, on a sunny day with highs in the mid-80s and only a 20% chance of precipitation.
He has been developing web applications since high school and fell in love with the Web all over again when he found the Rails framework.
The creator of the Haml markup language and Sass (Haml for CSS), Hampton blogs at http://hamptoncatlin.com and is currently a partner at Unspace Interactive in Toronto.

Product Details

• Paperback: 361 pages
• Publisher: Apress (July 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590596862
• ISBN-13: 978-1590596869
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #258,106 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great for getting started!, August 30, 2007

By	Ryan McMinn (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Not being a trained developer I am surely not the only one that got a little intimidated by Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)

This is a great book for beginners like me. You'll get a complete introduction to the Rails framework. If you already develop in Rails, look elsewhere but if you have heard the hype and want to see what all the fuss is about, take the plunge, this book will get you up to speed in no time.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very clear introduction to Rails, November 25, 2007

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

Highly recommended. The heart of the book, discussions in Chapters 4-6, on Active Record, Action View and controllers, are structured and clear. The authors have carefully prioritized the info that a beginning rails developer would need to know thoroughly, and presented it in short, to-the-point paragraphs, along with graphics (screen shots, mini-UML's for the active Record chapters, etc.) that reinforce the points well. Tables that give most common options for the feature being discussed are helpful, also.

I believe that the most difficult thing for a newbie is following the flow of logic in a MVC framework, from the web form that creates/finds a model object's params, to processing params in the controller and Active Record, including validations, showing errors and letting users correct them, CRUD processes in the DBMS and all the routing, renders and redirects that show users what's happening. The authors take each subtopic of Active Record, views and controllers, give an short, intuitive summary of why it's important, then give the most common use scenarios, along with common traps or misunderstandings that might arise.

Chapter 7, Ajax, tackles a large subject in a very condensed manner(they say as much on p. 228). While the overview is good, it's more like a 30,000 foot view that doesn't quite give you enough confidence to start coding in Prototype and scriptaculous. For that, there's the excellent "Ajax on Rails" Raymond book, as well as a couple others in the pipeline.

The rest of the covers testing, sending emails and deployment in, again, a condensed manner. Rails is a fast-moving target, there's a lot of topics that could have been covered here: rspec, test/spec, mocks and stubs, plugins to make fixtures usable, or avoid using fixtures, etc. But it's a great smallish intro to Rails. The appendix intro to Ruby is superfluous. If you already know python, perl or PHP, it might be all you need to get started coding ruby. Otherwise, you'll probably need a more complete intro and reference (Black's "ruby for Rails" is highly recommended).

So this is a topic-structured tutorial for Rails, in contrast to Apress' social networking and e-commerce books, which are project-based and present more code with less explanation (and covered more plugins like Ferret, acts_as_taggable, etc) If you ahve the luxury of borrowing a few different intro rails books , i would encourage it. One or the other method of presenting Rails may work better for you. But you can't go wrong with this book.

The typesetting is clear: code is readable, Tips and Notes are clearly demarcated. The one thing is tat some of the blurbs printed on gray backgrounds are a bit difficult to read

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Too Many Errors, December 27, 2007

By	Dick Kusleika - See all my reviews

I have zero experience in any web development. I'm on page 161 and I'm completely frustrated by the number of errors in this book. When you write for beginners, the code has to be perfect. I can tolerate typos in the text, but when the code doesn't compile, it's serious. You see, I can't spot obvious errors in the code. That's why I bought a book with 'Beginning' in the title.

What pushed me over the edge to write a bad review for this book is the code on page 160. It's listed on the book's errata page - which also contains at least one error. Through trial and error I figured out the correct syntax. There is nowhere on the book's site to contact anyone about fixing the errata page. There's no contact information that I could find on either author's blog.

If you are truly a beginner, as I am, you have to pass on this book. Maybe when they revise for RoR2.0 they'll fix the errors.