The Authoritative Rails Book | Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition

Amazing handson book | Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition | Sam Ruby, David Heinemeier Hansson

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	• Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition Sam Ruby, David Heinemeier Hansson Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2009 - 850 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Agile Extreme on Rails

It's a good text, but it might be recommended that an Agile Development specific book be read, either beforehand or concurrently, while evolving the knowledge imparted in these pages. "The Art of Agile Development" by James Shore is a good compliment to this reading. Agile of course, does not only apply to Ruby and Rails, but Ruby and Rails are uniquely fashioned to promote Agile techniques. Prior Rails books do not illuminate this connection so well as this one does, if at all. As such, it can be more highly recommended to learn rails via this book as it exposes this connection through-out. As a context sensitive framework, rails can be learned to the degree of exposing just that much, or ... one might learn how to use rails in an fully iterative and collaborative development environment. That statement should clarify the import of this book. One might claim that there is a right way to learn Rails and well then too, the old way. Learn it the right way, using Agile Development practices. One quickly notes that Agile is not just a management tool, but a programmer's development methodology. In fact it transcends many development functions, from product management to testing, final release and continued maintenance and support. Rails as a framework, is enhanced by an understanding of how it fits with Agile. This book goes miles toward making that clear.

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The Authoritative Rails Book

This is THE Rails book to own for both a primer and a reference book combined.

Amazing handson book

I bought this book and hope I can have some concrete examples for learning RoR, it did not disappoint me. I am using a little newer version of Ruby on Rails -- version 2.3.8 and I wasable to go through all the exercises in Chapter II, really amazing. Highly recommend it.

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Great Book if you Have Some Previous Programming Experience

I read this book in bits and pieces over the past 6 months, in between nights of writing code and spending time with my 8 month old. I have been developing apps in Rails for about 2 years now, but definitely knew that my on-the-job-training left me with a lot of gaps in my understanding of how things really worked behind the scenes in my Rails apps. Coming from a PHP background, I have to say that it has been a wonderful experience to work with the elegant, simple, yet powerful MVC stack that is Rails, and I have also become a big fan of the Ruby language.

I have worked professionally in the software field for over 10 years now, so I came into this book with a decent understanding of objects, databases, MVC, etc. As the review title suggests, I think anybody with a programming background is going to enjoy this book. It really provides a clean, easy to digest analysis of the internals of Rails and how to do everything from auto-building the initial framework of your app to creating a RESTful API with XML and scaling to handle larger loads via caching, server configurations and other techniques. The book starts out with a real world example of building a simple shopping cart app and an admin tool to manage it. I have always preferred learning by jumping in and getting your hands dirty, and I think the book does a great job or walking you through this process. I am fairly sure you can even get all the code for this sample app from the publisher's web site, if you want to tweak or customize it further.

Following the sample shopping cart app, the book iterates through all the other major components of Rails including ActionView, ActionMailer, ActiveRecord, Prototype/Scriptaculous, and more. My one (minor) complaint here is that different authors wrote different chapters here, and they all have different styles. Some of them tend to assume more than others about what you will understand without further explanation, so the amount of detail they each go into can vary. That said, you can always read up on the individual components on the web if you want to understand more about how they work.

So if you have some programming experience, I would highly recommend this book as a great introduction to Rails, or as a means of continuing education if you are already working with Rails but want to fully understand all of its components. For total newbies, I would check out Simply Rails 2.

Of course now that Rails 3 has been released, you could argue that both books will quickly become irrelevant until updated versions are released ;-)

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Excellent Resource

I picked up this book after reading a different Rails book. The other book was okay, but left me with a lot of questions. That is not the case with this book.

The first section of the book is real basic while you build an e-commerce application. The second half of the book shines. It goes into great detail about the framework, and how all the different aspects of Rails tie together.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking into Rails. Newbie or intermediate.

You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management.

But Rails is more than a set of best practices. Rails makes it both fun and easy to turn out very cool web applications. Need Ajax support, so your web applications are highly interactive? Rails has it built in. Want an application that sends and receives e-mail? Built in. Supports internationalization and localization? Built in. Do you need applications with a REST-based interface (so they can interact with other RESTful applications with almost no effort on your part)? All built-in.

With this book, you'll learn how to use ActiveRecord to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. Need to create and modify your schema? Migrations make it painless (and they're versioned, so you can roll changes backward and forward). 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, implement web services, and create dynamic, user-centric web-pages using built-in Javascript and Ajax support. There is extensive coverage of testing, and the rewritten Deployment chapter now covers Phusion Passenger.

As with the previous editions of the book, we start with an extended tutorial that builds parts of an online store. And, of course, the application has been rewritten to show the best of Rails V2.

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