Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy (Paperback)

by Justin Williams (Author)
Key Phrases: active record, action controller, satellite radio, New Item, Date Posted, Cancel Figure (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
In this book you'll learn:

• How to develop web applications quickly and easily with the Ruby on Rails framework
• The basics of programming principles and Ruby syntax, so you can begin to understand whats going on under the hood
• How to implement must-have web application features, such as user accounts, data validation, sending e-mail, image uploading, and more
• How to use Ajax techniques with Rails and when not to use them
• How to implement other Web 2.0 features in Rails, such as tag clouds and microformats

If you're a web designer or developer who thinks that the coding involved in developing dynamic web applications is too difficult, think again. This book, and the framework it covers, is the perfect solution to your needs. Ruby on Rails provides an easy-to-use method for quickly developing web applications, simplifying potentially complicated subjects such as web architecture, JavaScript, and SQL/database creation. The simplicity of Rails belies its power, though—this technology is used by major companies such as 37Signals and Google. The book provides an introduction to Ruby on Rails with the web designer in mind. Instead of focusing on the intricate syntax of each method, the book focuses on the tasks youll want to perform on your website and then walks you through how to implement that functionality with Rails. Design and usability are kept in mind throughout, ensuring that your site both looks and works great. The book begins by covering how to set up your computer as a Rails development environment (including the MySQL database) and then follows with an introduction to Ruby and the basics of the Rails framework. Next, you are taken through several practical examples that work together to build up a complete modern web application, covering essential and useful website features such as user login, adding and editing data, data validation, image uploading, and much more. The book even covers more-advanced Rails topics such as the Rails test suite, plug-ins and components, debugging techniques, and deploying your web applications using Capistrano. Summary of Contents:

• Chapter 1: Introduction to Ruby on Rails
• Chapter 2: Installing Rails
• Chapter 3: Ruby for Rails Developers
• Chapter 4: Getting Started with Rails
• Chapter 5: More Advanced Rails
• Chapter 6: Formatting Data
• Chapter 7: Introduction to Ajax
• Chapter 8: Bringing Forms to Life with Ajax
• Chapter 9: Uploading Files and Sending Attachments
• Chapter 10: User Authentication and Session Management
• Chapter 11: Customizing Rails Views
• Chapter 12: Using Rails Plug-ins and Engines
• Chapter 13: Deploying with Capistrano
• Appendix A: Caching Your Content
• Appendix B: Testing Rails

About the Author
Justin Williams is the owner of Second Gear LLC, a web application development firm, and was lead developer of Second Gear's Porchlight issue tracking system for small development teams. He graduated from Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN with a degree in Computer & Information Technology. His personal blog is located at carpeaqua.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: friends of ED (January 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597524
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597521
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #293,252 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cohesive introduction to Ruby on Rails, February 18, 2007

By	Nate Klaiber (nkbookreviews.com) - See all my reviews

Rails Solutions by Justin Williams was an excellent primer to the popular framework, Ruby on Rails. I recently had a chance to learn some basics of the RoR framework from a friend of mine, Stephen Rainey. He got me up and running and pointed me to some great resources and books. This book is a recent release from Friends of Ed and it is highly recommended if you are just getting your feet wet with Rails. The book walks you through each step to get up and running and developing the `Railslist' application. The author takes the time to walk through the installation process for both OS X and Windows. The flow of the book was very easy to read and each chapter built more from the previous chapters. The goal of the book was to create a working rails application, while showing you the possible routes and benefits. The overall flow looked a bit like this:

The first chapters were very elementary. This is a good thing for those looking to learn the right way to get started. The author walks you through Ruby, the language behind Rails, and shows you some of the constructs and nuances of the language. This is a good primer for those coming from another language (such as PHP) that looks very different. After the introduction to the language, he moved forward into the setup.

Installing Rails was painless. The author walks through the necessary steps to setup a development environment on the Mac and Windows platform. For those who are interested in some additional resources on setting up your environment, check out the updated Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X by Dan Benjamin. Personally, I have found using Mac Ports a very easy way to manage your development environment and it is worth a good look.

We are now ready to build our application! Through the next few chapters, the author walks you through creating a `railslist' application. With each chapter you learn new aspects of rails. You learn how to setup your project, how to use scaffolding, how to generate your models, views, and controllers, and how to get your database connected and working. He goes in depth on each aspect. Setting up relationships and validations in your model (ActiveRecord), setting up your Controllers and using custom routing, and then how to get your views in place and use partials and .rjs files. Towards the end, we even get to add a dash of Ajax to the application for some simple tasks.

The last chapters and appendices discuss deployment of your application to a production server and all the pieces that need to be in place to go live to the public and handle the traffic. Though this book covered the steps, I have heard that there is more to be said on deploying your application - so you may want to look at some more resources.

This book is for a beginner to Rails. If you are an advanced programmer or have been in Rails for a while now - then this book is not for you (and the author states this in the first paragraph of the book). I felt that there were some pieces that could have been discussed related to progressive enhancement and accessibility (AJAX and CSS), especially when building the AJAX into the application. However, that is no reason to not give this book a chance.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Why can't technical books be edited before publication?, November 4, 2008

By	Will (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

Three stars = five stars for the author and 0 stars for the editor.

This would be a fine introduction to Rails: not too much, not too little, just enough to get you up and running with a nice toy application. However, the sample code simply will not run as presented in the book. This is bad for a book that is essentially a single project.

Some of the problems are inevitable. Method names got changed in later versions of Ruby. This is not the fault of the author. But along with the little annoying mistakes in sample code, there are some real boners -- for instance, chapter tabs that read 1, 2, 3, 6, ...
Did anyone look at the galley proofs?

On the other hand, although working through the errors is frustrating, it can be instructive. You will get familiar with http://api.rubyonrails.org/ and the forums a little sooner than you would expect with a beginner book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pro's won't need it, and Novices won't be able to connect the dots, July 31, 2008

By	Torbu (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I can only warn you not to use this book to start learning Ruby on Rails! First of all, you'll have a lot of trouble using the examples with Ruby on Rails 2.0 or higher, unless they've come out with an updated edition of this book. Ruby on Rails 2.0 has some significant changes incorporated from its predecessors that will not work with the examples in this book.

This book walks you through an example that creates basically a simple web application similar to craigslist, but it leaves a lot of relevant information unaddressed. I used to develop pretty good solutions in C and C++ about 10 years ago and now I thought I could use this experience to get into Ruby on Rails fairly easy, but this book just didn't do it for me. It doesn't provide enough background information tying everything together and connecting the dots. And just walking somebody through a list of examples simply doesn't do it. There's more to teaching then documenting a few code examples!