Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition (Paperback)

~ (Author), David Hansson (Author), (Author), (Author), James Duncan Davidson (Author), Justin Gehtland (Author), Andreas Schwarz (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The definitive, Jolt-award winning guide to learning and using Rails is now in its Second Edition. Rails is a new approach to web-based application development that enables developers to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications using less code and less effort. Now programmers can get the job done right and still leave work on time.

NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION: The book has been updated to take advantage of all the new Rails 1.2 features. The sample application uses migrations, Ajax, features a REST interface, and illustrates new Rails features. There are new chapters on migrations, active support, active record, and action controller (including the new resources-based routing). The Web 2.0 and Deployment chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect the latest thinking. Now you can learn which environments are best for your style application, and see how Capistrano makes managing your site simple. All the remaining chapters have been extensively updated. Finally, hundreds of comments from readers of the first edition have been incorporated, making this book simply the best available.

Rails is a full-stack, open source web framework that enables you to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications with a twist...you can create a full Rails application using less code than the setup XML you'd need just to configure some other frameworks.

With this book, you'll learn how to use Rails Active Record to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. You'll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, talk to web services, and interact dynamically with JavaScript applications running in the browser (the "Ajax" architecture).

You'll see how easy it is to deploy Rails. You'll be writing applications that work with your favorite database (MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and more) in no time at all.

About the Author

McGraw-Hill authors represent the leading experts in their fields and are dedicated to improving the lives, careers, and interests of readers worldwide

David Heinemeier Hansson is a partner in 37signals and the creator of the Web-application framework Ruby on Rails. For his work on Rails, he won Best hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O'Reilly, in 2006, he accepted the Jolt award of product excellence for Rails 1.0

Clark is a senior analyst at Lucin and is responsible for www.salcentral.com the first web services brokerage.

Davidson is a freelance author, speaker, and software consultant, focusing on Mac OS X, Java, and XML technologies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 719 pages
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; 2 edition (December 14, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977616630
• ISBN-13: 978-0977616633
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #190,558 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy this book, May 7, 2008

By	David Alison - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It does not reflect the current state of Rails at this time. A new version is supposed to come out in October 2008 that covers 2.0. If you get this version you will need to switch to an older version of Rails, otherwise you'll only get about 68 pages in before the examples stop working.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All Technical Books Should be Written Like This One, February 17, 2007

By	J. Moore "hierophant" (Garden of Earthly Delights) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a web developer, I own literally hundreds of technical books - most of are either thick tomes full of encyclopedic information you'll never use in real life. This book is perfect for learning rails. You jump right in and develop an application - getting a taste for what you'd be doing in real life right away. Datailed explanations are left for later, when you better understand how the platform actually works.

The example application you'll develop, if you follow the book as you should, is a real-world shopping cart type app. Along the way you'll pick up some agile development.

I would not recommend this book to absolute beginners to web development - you should understand some basic web development. This book takes you through everything from installing rails and MySQL to deployment.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond great: best book, best reference, best index (and funny), September 18, 2007

By	tomh (Newton, MA United States) - See all my reviews

I am an oldster (you know, 40+) and have learned many a language. Kernigan and Ritchie wrote their "K & R" C-language book in some written language a little higher level than English. After 40 or 50 reads through, I got it. I read C++ books, SmallTalk, Delphi, Visual Basic, and many Java books, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Awk, Emacs, REXX (!!), and just about everything O'Reily has ever published.

Now, I come to Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. Thank goodness for this book. What a relief to read a book that is 1) comprehensive, 2) practical, 3) accurate, 4) funny at times, and 5) above all, has a good index! Perhaps programming languages are (finally) getting easier to write about, but Dave Thomas is an outstanding technical writer: he knows his audience and writes for us. Look, I know a million programming languages, but I am not the kind of person who zips through a book and suddenly gets it. Most books are written by people who are experts in the nuances, but have forgotten the many steps that lead up to those nuances.

AWDWR is better. It starts with a non-trivial and complete tutorial -- the first half of the book is an application that manages to hit most of the critical aspects of actually doing the job. It is a reasonably broad application covering many points of real webapps. (I read through thinking, yeah, we managed to deal with that in our Java webapp in a month, and here it is, built in to Rails, and better ... more than once). Maybe it is Rails, which seems to be a significant step in maturity over current generations (my last was WebWork/Struts 2, which seems to be the best you can do with Java these days, but really only one part of the larger problem).

But I have to give great respect to Dave Thomas and the other great writers who all made this second edition book a great, great book. I could follow along when reading, I actually did the whole tutorial and found myself learning almost all the way through typing the examples in by hand (mostly by learning how to debug my typos and understanding how the language and framework responded). Now that we're writing our real software, we still look back at the tutorial to get a clear view of how all the parts fit together.

The second part of the book is a solid documentation of the components and APIs available. It is not complete, but nor should it be -- if you want the API, link to the Rails site API. It does cover the important points, however, and ties them back to the tutorial where appropriate. Various important aspects are covered in enough detail to get the idea across, but not so much as to be just a lexicon.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. If this is your first programming book, it will be a struggle, but less than most, and if you're a professional software engineer with one or two languages under your belt (and reasonable proficiency at the command line), you will find this a great reference for learning, and for doing.