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Beginning Ruby on Rails (Wrox Beginning Guides) (Paperback)

by Steve Holzner Ph.D. (Author)
Key Phrases: def greeting, data from text fields, new view template, File Edit View Favorites Tools Help, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Submit Query (more...)

3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Ruby on Rails is the revolutionary online programming tool that makes creating functional e-commerce web sites faster and easier than ever. With the intuitive, straightforward nature of Ruby and the development platform provided by Rails, you can put together full-fledged web applications quickly, even if you're new to web programming.

You will find a thorough introduction to both Ruby and Rails in this book. You'll get the easy instructions for acquiring and installing both; understand the nature of conditionals, loops, methods, and blocks; and become familiar with Ruby's classes and objects. You'll learn to build Rails applications, connect to databases, perform necessary testing, and put the whole thing together to create real-world applications such as shopping carts and online catalogs--apps you can actually use right away.

What you will learn from this book
* How to install and use Ruby and Rails
* Object-oriented programming with Ruby
* Rails fundamentals and how to create basic online applications
* How to work with HTML controls, use models in Rails applications, and work with sessions
* Details on working with databases and creating, editing, and deleting database records
* Methods for handling cookies and filters and for caching pages
* How to connect Rails with Ajax

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to develop online applications using Ruby and Rails. A basic understanding of programming is helpful; some knowledge of HTML is necessary.

Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

From the Back Cover
Ruby on Rails is the revolutionary online programming tool that makes creating functional e-commerce web sites faster and easier than ever. With the intuitive, straightforward nature of Ruby and the development platform provided by Rails, you can put together full-fledged web applications quickly, even if you're new to web programming.

You will find a thorough introduction to both Ruby and Rails in this book. You'll get the easy instructions for acquiring and installing both; understand the nature of conditionals, loops, methods, and blocks; and become familiar with Ruby's classes and objects. You'll learn to build Rails applications, connect to databases, perform necessary testing, and put the whole thing together to create real-world applications such as shopping carts and online catalogs—apps you can actually use right away.

What you will learn from this book

How to install and use Ruby and Rails
Object-oriented programming with Ruby
Rails fundamentals and how to create basic online applications
How to work with HTML controls, use models in Rails applications, and work with sessions
Details on working with databases and creating, editing, and deleting database records
Methods for handling cookies and filters and for caching pages
How to connect Rails with Ajax

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to develop online applications using Ruby and Rails. A basic understanding of programming is helpful; some knowledge of HTML is necessary.

Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

Paperback: 380 pages
Publisher: Wrox (November 29, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0470069155
ISBN-13: 978-0470069158
Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 9.1 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #277,299 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
def greeting, data from text fields, new view template, data from checkboxes, def initialize, nice digital clock, method named greeting, yml file, nice calculator, getter action, params hash, manage controller, input end end, place this code, beautiful printer, create table items, cart class, shared helper, partial templates, buy controller, end def, named look, statement modifiers, control shortcuts, use ruby

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
File Edit View Favorites Tools Help, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Submit Query, Show Edit Destroy, Option Description, Done Local, Using Views, Working With Views, Eastern Standard Time, Create Back, Handling Ajax Data, Working With Two Views, Buy From Our Store, Cary Grant, End User License Agreement, Started Finished, Using Select Controls, Working With Text Fields, File Edit View Favorites Tools Hell, Handling Ajax Searches, Name Description Price Calculator Nice, Name Grade, Using Text Fields, Using Two Views, Done Figure

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Customer Reviews

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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Introduction to Ruby on Rails, December 2, 2006

By	Danstan Bagenda (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have been looking at various books on RoR. Most of them seem to be targeted towards people with some prior knowledge of RoR. This is the first that has been very simple, very clear and that takes you through each step assuming only a VERY BASIC knowledge of HTML and nothing else. If you are new to RoR THIS is the book for you!! It clearly goes through EACH step explaining why & highlighting pieces of code. For example, it does not, like almost all the books that I have read, assume that you already know what MVC means & WHY it is a concept that makes sense to use. the author goes through the process of explaining the concept of Model-View-Controller, while at the same time taking your through SIMPLE easy to understand examples which illustrate the concepts claerly and give you that `light bulb' moment.
The book builds in this way, with examples which keep adding one new simple layer at a time (not several so that you are lost) but eventually leading you into the guts of RoR. Suddenly, without realizing it, you find yourself in the midst of having set up an application without realizing it & this itself makes you understand WHY Ruby for Rails is becoming very popular.
If you want to know what RoR is about and are starting out in this discovery, THIS is the book for you. By the end of the book you will realize that you are ready to start developing your own applications. I am one of those people that need to know why I am doing something - lots of books have simply shown HOW to do things.
This book does both & its the book I have been looking for. The type of book I wanted - the one ``epiphany book''. I suggest that any newbie start with this & then after you read this (& it is an easy read), you can then go to the other books which I think are good after you realize how all this makes sense. I should emphasize that this book as well later deals with most of the more "advanced" topics found in some of the others - but it leads into them gradually in a logical way that helps you understand why & how those tools fall into place with RoR. To further illustrate my previous frustration, I had previously seen several mind-blowing online screencasts on "unit tests", but it was not clear to me exactly what a "unit test" was, and why they were done & how the way RoR dealt with them made web application more efficient. After reading this book I seem to know WHY & HOW ALL these things come together to make RoR the talk of web development.

The book only requires that you know some LITTLE html, & the author obviously introduces Ruby to start - in the same easy style (even including "try it outs" together). Again, the author SHOWS how and why the 2 work together. All those little things that no one bothered to tell you about will be revealed by reading this book...

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good place to start working with Rails, January 30, 2007

By	C. Young "C. Young" (West Jordan, UT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am not a fan of Wrox books. It has nothing to do with their content, but the layout of their books is irritating to me, so I find their books hard to read. Having said that, I think this is one of the best books written for the beginning Rails user.

Most books (and online tutorials) try to teach Rails by going through a big monolithic project one step at a time. Those books have good information too, and are great if the books project happens to be what you want to create; however, this one actually tells you how Rails works, which I find infinitely easier to grasp and use.

I was not a beginner with Ruby or Rails prior to reading this book. I had already read several others and used Rails on a couple of small projects. Nonetheless, I found that this book filled in some of the holes in my mind regarding Rails, so I would recommend it to both the beginner and intermediate user.

The only thing I found lacking in this book is a thorough explanation of migrations and how to use them. Migrations are easier to understand for beginners, I think, than manually creating your data tables; as is done in this book. The Apress book on creating E-Commerce sites with Rails contains a good explanation of migrations, I think.

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good first guide, but incomplete, January 26, 2007

By	Jason A. Salas (Dededo, Guam Guam) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've been a big fan and advocate of Dr. Steven Holzner's technical writing ever since penned wrote what, in my humble opinion, is THE authoritative JavaScript reference, New Riders' "Inside JavaScript". So it was with great enthusiasm (perhaps unfairly so) that I purchased "Beginning Ruby on Rails" by Wrox. I expected a lot out of it, which goes against my journalism disciplines of approaching each review objectively and without bias.

First, the positives. The good doctor's redeeming quality as a technical author is his ability to make the complex graspable for an audience - being neither too intimidating for the beginning coder, nor too condescending for the experienced architect. In this light, the book is very well done. Also, many readers with whom I've interacted find the holy grail of Rails writing, "Agile Development with Rails" to be too presumptuous and at times difficult to grok. Holzner addresses this crowd very appropriately, so those new to Rails, or Ruby programming, or web development in general will appreciate this book.

I realize that writing an introductory level book on any web framework is a huge undertaking for any platform. An author has to introduce a programming language, object-oriented tenets, database theory, SQL, operating systems support, web server integration, page handling, etc. - and then get into the actual web development. Add to this the challenge of a framework like Rails evolving at such a pace that a major publication might be outdated by the time it hits the shelves, and you've got a pretty daunting task at hand.

Holzner gives a good introduction into the Rails directory structure, working with databases, command-line syntax for creating Rails apps, working with Rails scaffolding, and provides a very healthy discussion for using Ajax in Rails. There's practical code in the book you can yank and use right away (not dependent on previous chapters), and the book shows how to work with WEBrick. There's a nice little section on unit testing, and cited are examples for setting up Rails on a Windows PC, a Mac, or a Linux box, so the content is available to a wide audience.

But with that said, I found the book to be short in a couple of key areas.

Only a scant amount of information was provided on working with XML and for using ActionController for REST-like URL mapping. And there isn't anything at all presented on the use of RJS templates. And there's likewise a tragic omission of using Rails to author web services, and nothing was presented about apps based on real-world relationships from database tables, only a simple one-to-many example. I also found the book to be incomplete without a firm discussion of a page's life cycle when handled by Rails. And there shockingly wasn't enough mentioned about the critical facet of Rails - its underlying Model-View-Controller architecture.

And what winds up being the book's most code-heavy example - a Rails shopping cart using session data and custom models - is merely regurgitation of the Pragmatic Programmers sample in the "Agile..." book.

The book's appendix is merely the answers to the end-of-chapter questions. I would have liked to see such a section dedicated towards more in-depth info on keeping Rails up to date, working with and authoring custom Ruby gems, examples of various sites currently using Rails, URLs to screencasts and podcasts, and IDEs developers can use instead of hand-coding new applications each and every time out. Since the examples mainly create a new rails app for each demo, I worry that the book may allow the first-time reader to misconstrue Rails development as a lot of work for even the simplest of jobs. Which defeats the whole purpose of Rails to begin with.

So, I'm giving this book 3 stars. It's very well written with a friendly voice and it'll get you into Rails fast. It's a great way to start learning RoR development for any level of developer. I've shared it with a few friends in academic circles and also with non-technical people, and it suits both equally effectively. But even at that, and considering myself an experienced - but not expert - Rails developer, the book is a bit incomplete without several critical discussions.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction
As a programmer who has been reading this kind of stuff for 30 years, I found the book to be a very adequate introduction. Read more

Published 3 months ago by Dylan Fan

3.0 out of 5 stars This book is not for Ruby on Rails 2.0
This book was written based on Ruby On Rails v.1. Since the syntax of version 1 and 2 are very different, most of the codes provided in this book will NOT work with version 2... Read more

Published 4 months ago by Mark Twain

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, a book that actually *teaches*
I am tired of books that present a giant, extended tutorial, revealing bits and pieces while continually dragging you deeper into a dense forest of detail, leaving you, machete in... Read more

Published 13 months ago by Michael Rogers

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Rails Beginners Guide!!
'Beginning Ruby on Rails' by extreme (lots of publications) author Steven Holzner is an absolute must-buy for anyone looking to start learning Ruby on Rails!! Read more

Published 16 months ago by Daniel McKinnon

3.0 out of 5 stars For absolute beginners or those without a lot of time
Of the many RoR books I've read, this is probably the easiest to follow. If you don't have a lot of time and want to satisfy your RoR curiosity, this is your book. Read more

Published on June 7, 2007 by Loc Nguyen

3.0 out of 5 stars Not for professional developers
The only reason I'm giving this book 3 stars is the good introduction to Ruby at the beginning. Its coverage of Rails is simplistic. Read more

Published on March 13, 2007 by Sam L.

5.0 out of 5 stars For a creative beginner
Well written book with very good examples. Especially the source code can became the inspiration for own projects.

Published on January 18, 2007 by Edward Kniazycki

3.0 out of 5 stars Only if you are absolute begginer
This book is for those who have not had any contact with Ruby on Rails. If you've read the most common tutorials on the Internet this book should not help you too much. Read more

Published on January 8, 2007 by Gabriel Bogea Perez

4.0 out of 5 stars A good intro book
I'm using this book to teach an Introduction to Rails course at the college level. It is well written, has plenty of good examples, and provides a good introduction to both Ruby... Read more

Published on December 12, 2006 by Max Digits

5.0 out of 5 stars Very easy to read and grasp the concepts
It is written in a very clear way and makes it easy to understand for the beginner. Beginners must read this book to prepare themselves to move on to heavier books like Ruby for... Read more

Published on December 11, 2006 by uml_zepho_com

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