Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap: Powerful, Effective, and Efficient Full-Stack Web Development 1st Edition

This book made me cringe at some of the things it has you do. The book will give you plenty of code bits to paste into various files with very little explanation as to what they do. It also suggest you do many things that seem to just create tremendous overhead. For example, it tells you to install Node in order to install Bower in order to install Bootstrap. It has you do this so you will 'know' what version of Bootstrap you are using. This is all fine until you find out that Bootstrap can be installed via Ruby Gems (you can even pick a specific version). I bet system admins that work with the author enjoy allocating resources for him to do what amounts to version control. My other flaw with the book is that it doesn't really teach any of the subjects. It's pretty much an overview of them to get them working. It even states early on that if you want to lean Rails to simply read a different book. I'm taking the author's advice and I'm learning rails from a different book with the money I got by refunding this useless cash grab.

A must-have for taking Rails development to the next level.
The Postgres sections alone are worth the price. (Full text search, anyone?)
However, you must be at least moderately familiar with Rails, SQL, HTML and JavaScript.
Magnificent.

Great book. I'm still new to Rails, Angular, Postgres and Bootstrap. This book helped to encapsulate all of these tools into one app.

Only about half way through... but so far its been a great read, learning a ton of interesting and practical skills. Author is really helpful and responsive on the forum for the book as well.

very well-written text, excellent online trouble shooting by the author, and easy to follow, step by step teaching method.

Took my Postgres and angular knowledge to a new level in a seamless timely fashion. Highly recommend it; a must read

Informative book.

I am the architect and implementer of nderground (nderground dot net) a social network built with the Grails framework. The implementation languages of Grails are Groovy and Java. In building nderground I used Postgres (the managed Amazon service RDS/Postgres). I have used Bootstrap to build the nderground web pages.

When I saw the book Rails, Angular, Postgres and Bootstrap I thought that it would be a chance to learn about how the Ruby on Rails framework can apply some of the components I had used with the Grails framework. I was especially interested in learning about how AngularJS could be used. One of the challenges in building modern web applications is the complexity of the client side code and I was hoping that learn whether AngularJS could be used to manage this complexity.

The first thing that the potential reader should know about David Copeland's book is that this is not a book for beginners. If you have never worked with a web application framework like Ruby on Rails, Django or Grails, I think that you're going to have a hard time with this book. The author implicitly assumes that you understand the Model-View-Controller structure that these frameworks use. Similarly, if you don't know anything about JavaScript or Relational Databases and SQL parts of this book may be difficult to understand.

David Copeland's book reminded me of a cookbook that I was once given by the famous French Chef Escoffier. As with this book, Escoffier was writing for experienced practitioners. His recipes are outlines of how to build French cuisine, assuming that the reader has already mastered the necessary technique. I have never been a cook on that level, so I ended up giving the book away (Julia Child is more my speed).

Rails, Angular, Postgres and Bootstrap will help the reader understand how to build powerful web applications, within the Rails framework. The power of modern web frameworks is that they allow the programmer to leverage the framework to create an application more quickly. David Copeland outlines how each of the components can be used and how they fit together in a web application architecture. He provides code snippets in Ruby, HTML/Bootstrap that show how the elements fit together.

The book starts out where most web applications do, with the construction of a login and authentication infrastructure. This uses the Devise Ruby component. As David Copeland notes, building your own authentication can be complicated (I did this for nderground). Leveraging Devise is a way to do this much more rapidly. Devise provides high quality encryption that resists cracking.

A feature of the book that I really liked was the focus on the open source Postgres database. Some developers mindlessly use MySQL because it is the current fad for web databases (and because it is easy to interface MySQL with JavaScript). As Copeland points out, Postgres is a much more powerful, industrial strength database.

The book assumes a fair amount of familiarity with Ruby on Rails. For example, David Copeland refers to Rails' Active Record object-relational-mapping framework and seems to assume that the reader is familiar it. Active Record has some excellent documentation on the Active Record Wiki, but I think that it would have been useful to provide an Active Record overview.

The book jumps into the analysis and optimization of SQL query performance. However, for web many applications, if the designer chooses the database indices properly, Postgres performance will be very good. Only in the case where the database must handle huge amounts of data (e.g., hundreds of gigabytes or a terabyte or so) or there are complex queries is query analysis necessary. The book does not mention the open source Postgres tool PGAdmin, which can be used for query analysis. The examples in the book use the Postgres command line.

In applying Rails, AngularJS and Bootstrap the book necessarily mixes these frameworks in some of the example code. However, at times I had to read the examples carefully to understand what was Bootstrap and what was Angular and how they interacted.

If you have some solid Ruby on Rails experience and are well versed in relational databases, especially Postgres, this book will allow you to build more powerful web applications, with less effort. However, even for those who are experienced, careful reading will be necessary, since the book covers a huge amount of material.