Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)

I'm an experienced developer in HTML and CSS so I thought I'd try my hand at my first real programming and hop on the latest band wagon of Ruby on Rails.

I boldy read my way through Chapters 1 and 2, having to refer to the web for definitions on acronyms I didn't know and re-read some of the particularly jargon-filled paragraphs that made assumptions about what I already knew thinking "Ok, it seems a bit tricky, but I understand the concepts so I'm sure I'll get the hang of it once I hit the real examples." I didn't even get to the real examples.

The installation section is a real let-down. Using Mac OS Leopard, I am informed that I have all of the tools, I just need to enable them, where it then tells me to go on a load of web sites to look up how to do this. Totally unhelpful. I'm sure that seasoned programmers know how to set up their particular environments and that using Ruby on Rails is just some small tweaks to their command lines and off they go, but I was left um-ing and argh-ing as I downloaded tool after tool and followed online tutorial after online tutorial trying to work out what the hell I was supposed to be doing.

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but I assumed that by buying a rather pricey book that you'd get all the info in the book, rather than having to rummage around the web, and maybe the tools should be included on a disc or to download from a dedicated web site or something?

Needless to say, I gave up and have bought Sitepoint's 'Simply Rails 2.' Having read a lot of Sitepoint books in the past, I'm hoping that this will live up to their standards- I'll post a review to that when I'm a bit further in!

Great Book but currently out of date (0/0 people found this helpful)

At the time of writing this review, the current edition of the book (edition 2) is out of date and is not designed for Rails 2.0.

So although this is a marvellous in depth book, if you have no experience in Rails development their are to many workarounds to use the book with the current rails release. This being said it is possible to run an older edition of Rails on your computer, and therefore you can follow the book.

If you have previous experience in web development using PHP, then check out Rails For PHP developers. I have been using this book to get up to speed with rails and have found it a great help.

Great but remember to use Rails 1.2.6 (0/0 people found this helpful)

This book is very well structured and written but if you are new to RAILS remember to use version 1.2.6 to avoid incompatibility issues.

Hopefully we'll get a new version soon with all the examples compatible with RAILS version 2.0.

Great Starting Point (0/0 people found this helpful)

This book gave me a great starting point for building an e-commerce website in Ruby on Rails. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to dive into Ruby on Rails.

New to Rails? Don't think twice. Buy this book (2/2 people found this helpful)

I don't normally leave reviews of books on Amazon, but I wanted to for Agile Web Development with Rails. Why? Simply because this is SUCH a good book.

I came to Rails (and Ruby) cold, though with a Java and C background, and this book got me up and running in a remarkably short space of time.

It is very well written, wonderfully easy to follow and pitched at a good level to be of use to complete beginners and more experienced developers alike (the start is for newbies, the back end for more clued-up coders -- which you will be by the time you get there). I'm already on my second independent Rails app (not counting the tutorial one in the book), and I'm astounded how confident I feel with it already!

Thoroughly, thoroughly recommended, as is the companion book 'Programming Ruby' - which helps fill in the full details about the actual Ruby language if you need to get your hands properly dirty.

Dave Thomas, David Hansson , Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Davidson, Justin Gehtland, Andreas Schwarz

Reader Reviews:

Not Good For A Beginner To Programming (1/1 people found this helpful)

Great Book but currently out of date (0/0 people found this helpful)

Great but remember to use Rails 1.2.6 (0/0 people found this helpful)

Great Starting Point (0/0 people found this helpful)

New to Rails? Don't think twice. Buy this book (2/2 people found this helpful)

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